Crooked Media - What A Day: Back at the Manch

For a relatively young organization, the political “nonprofit” (lol) No Labels has caused many headaches and raised even more questions about who is stuffing its coffers full of cash. 
 

• No Labels is a self-described grassroots movement of “over 1 million Americans” (people whose email addresses are on a list? Less than half the number of people who will attend Taylor Swift’s Eras tour?) who are just, wouldn’t you know it, sick and tired of all of the partisan riff-raff! Only, as was pretty obvious to most people almost immediately, that isn’t the whole story. The organization threatened to run a third-party challenger of its own in the event of a Trump-Biden re-match, but looks increasingly committed to spoiling the election for Biden, specifically.
   

• The group’s own polling shows that a “moderate, independent third-party candidate” would pull more votes from Biden than Trump in a hypothetical three-way 2024 race, and when questioned about that, one of the group’s founders, Holly Page, simply replied, “It really doesn’t matter.” We beg to differ, lady! A No Labels staffer told Politico in June that the organization would withdraw its potential challenge to 2024 if Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) becomes the GOP nominee, further underscoring the group’s transparent goal of taking votes from Biden alone, not some phony higher calling to fight “extremism on both sides”
   

• No Labels has made its threat increasingly explicit, saying it plans to unveil a slate of “common-sense” (kill me) policy solutions on Sunday followed by an event at St. Anselm College in all-important New Hampshire on Monday. The org’s founding chairman is former U.S. Senator Joe Liberman, whom you may remember as the whiny independent responsible for killing the public option during the Affordable Care Act negotiations. No Labels does not disclose its donors because, according to its website, “We live in an era where agitators and partisan operatives try to destroy and intimidate organizations they don’t like by attacking their individual supporters.” Sure. Yeah. It’s definitely not because the group is propped up by dark money.

Mainstream lawmakers and strategists quickly assessed the danger posed by No Labels, and they aren’t taking any chances. 
 

• Former House Democratic leader Richard Gephardt is reportedly planning to launch a new bipartisan group next week to oppose the No Labels spoiling plan, and he appears to be assembling a team that includes a who’s-who of former Democratic senators who were unceremoniously pushed out of their seats in red states, including Claire McCaskill (D-MO), Doug Jones (D-AL), and Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND). These Democrats lining up against No Labels are not left-wing insurgents; they’re mainstream, moderate Democrats who largely hail from MAGA country. 
   

• No Labels has also found enemies among the centrist group of bipartisan lawmakers known as the House Problem Solvers Caucus (a group No Labels created!), the center-left, pro-business, Third Way think tank, and Never-Trump Republicans. Angering huge swaths of people on both sides of the aisle? Sen. Joe Manchin’s (D-WV) ears are ringing. Manchin will travel to New Hampshire with No Labels, but says he’s joining as “strictly a conference we’re having on common sense,” and not a tacit presidential campaign announcement. Still, he made sure to note that he hasn’t ruled that out, either. And over the past two years, Manchin has done a lot to show his commitment to obstructing President Biden’s agenda. 

No Labels touts its hypothetical candidate, infuriatingly, as “Insurance Policy 2024” but the only thing a third-party candidate would insure is Donald Trump’s ignominious return to the White House. There is a strong case to be made against the two-party system, to be certain, but that’s not what No Labels is doing—it’s a group of self-interested rich people who want a president who will make them richer, just in a less optically odious package.

Bros, dudes, and people who support abortion rights: the Crooked Store has some new merch just for you. The Bros For Roe collection of tees and koozies is a great way to show that the right to an abortion is important for people of all genders while also keeping your beer cold. We gotta reclaim beer culture from Brett Kavanaugh, folks.
 

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As the Writers Strike stretches into summer, television-industry executives reportedly have no intention of sitting down at the bargaining table until the fall. According to sources close to the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, since receiving encouragement from Wall Street, studio executives seem determined to “break the WGA.” One studio executive told Deadline, “The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.” Wow, glad to see everyone acting in good faith! From these developments, it’s clear that the studios want to make the writers so financially desperate that the AMPTP will be able to dictate most of the terms of any possible agreement. The WGA has repeatedly offered to meet with the AMPTP since going on strike on May 2, but the studios remain silent, unwilling to resume talks. As deeply cynical as the studios’ “Let’s starve the writers until they cave” strategy is, they clearly did not account for the fact that writers are already used to living on a shoestring, which is, you know, how they ended up on strike in the first place.

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee have urged Rep. James Comer (R-KY), the committee chair, to open an investigation into Gal Luft, the GOP “star witness” who was meant to skewer President Biden but ended up being…an asset for the Chinese government.

Lawyers who have argued huge cases in front of the Supreme Court—including the recent case to end Affirmative Action—were found to have paid one of Justice Clarence Thomas’s top aides…via Venmo?

Mesha Mainor, a Democrat in the Georgia House of Representatives defected to the Republican Party on Tuesday, which will increase the Republican majority and make Mainor the first Black woman Republican in the State House. Mainor had recently broken with Democrats over state-funded private-school vouchers, policing, and prosecutorial oversight. 

Air Force General Charles Brown, Jr., President Biden’s nominee for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday he believes Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) will cause the armed services to “lose talent,” by blocking hundreds of military promotions, which could affect overall institutional readiness. 

A bill banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy passed in the Iowa state legislature and is now headed to the desk of Gov. Kim Reynolds (R-IA) who plans to sign it. 

Milan Kundera, the celebrated author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, died on Tuesday in Paris at 94. 

An update from yesterday’s “Under the Radar” story: Ray Epps’s defamation lawsuit against Fox News is live. The dollar amount he’s seeking in damages will be announced at trial.

Since Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) launched his first presidential campaign, the Democratic Socialists of America has exploded, upping its national membership from 5,000 to over 92,000 in less than a decade. The group has run successful campaigns across the country and in some places become a force to be reckoned with in left-wing American politics. But success has also ushered in a dynamic that befalls every progressive movement: fractious infighting. Discord within local DSA chapters has made national news, and it’s damaging the organization’s reputation. The central struggle is between members who focus on winning elections to advance policy goals and hard-line ideologues who balk at the strategic use of legislative compromise and coalition building. In Boston, DSA-backed state-Rep. Mike Connolly (D-MA) withdrew his affiliation from the organization ahead of expulsion for endorsing a non-DSA Democratic candidate in 2020 and supporting a state push to lift the ban on rent control that did not exactly align with DSA’s platform. The Intercept documented the full list of accusations against him as well as Connolly’s responses. Connolly is one of DSA’s big success stories, so the local chapter’s desire to expel him should have many progressives scratching their heads. As Joe Caiazzo, a top Bernie Sanders 2020 aide put it, infighting does nothing to help working people (DSA’s expressed mission), and ultimately “takes the service out of public service.” It would be something of a tragedy to see an organization that does so much great work fold under the weight of infighting.

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Annual inflation in the United States slowed to three percent last month, down from a staggering 9.1 percent this time last year. Inflation has been cooling for 12 consecutive months and is now hovering just above the Federal Reserve’s target “normal,” making Republicans very sad 

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) sent a letter to the policy-making body for the federal courts system to end the practice of case assignment that allows parties to effectively select their judges. 

There’s still quite a ways to go, but Europe’s top human rights court ruled in favor of Olympic runner Caster Semenya, whose career has been put on hold because of her naturally-high testosterone levels. The ruling gives her a chance to fight the rule that requires female athletes like her to take drugs to lower their testosterone levels.