Crooked Media - What A Day: Swing states and arrows

The Biden campaign has clearly seen Trump’s polling numbers, because it’s all hands on deck in the sprint to November. 

• President Biden is preparing an offensive sweep through all-important Pennsylvania next week, where he will hammer home his plans to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans and corporations to contrast disgraced former president Donald Trump’s free-for-all giveaway to the wealthy that stemmed from his 2017 tax cuts. 

• The Pennsylvania-palooza will kick off on Tuesday with the president delivering a major address in his hometown of Scranton, PA. He’ll then travel to Pittsburgh on Wednesday, and speak at a campaign event in Philadelphia on Thursday. The Biden campaign is making a forceful pitch to working-class voters just a few weeks after Trump told a room full of wealthy donors that extending his 2017 tax cuts would be a priority if he’s elected to a second term. Since those cuts, average Americans continue to struggle financially while billionaires have doubled their wealth. 

• Vice President Kamala Harris arrived in Tucson on Friday, having been deployed there by the White House after the Arizona State Supreme Court ruled to reinstate a near-total ban on abortion from 1864. Republicans in the state’s legislature have blocked Democratic attempts to repeal the ban. The Biden campaign is (rightly) going all-in to hold disgraced former president Donald Trump responsible for the Arizona ban and its genesis: the 2022 Dobbs decision that ended the federally-protected right to abortion. “Donald Trump is the architect of this health care crisis," Harris said. “And that's not a fact he hides. In fact, he brags about it.”

• Perhaps the most prominent obstacle to President Biden regaining the coalition that delivered the White House to him in 2020 is one his campaign has yet to meaningfully address: that the progressive flank of the Democratic Party has coalesced around opposition to Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war. In response to the October 7 Hamas attacks that killed 1,200 Israelis, Israel has conducted a relentless military campaign in Gaza that has reduced much of the enclave to rubble, with over 33,000 people killed according to the Gaza Health Ministry. 

• The “uncommitted” movement of voters who cast protest votes in recent Democratic primaries to send a message to the White House has yielded staggering results. In some states like Wisconsin, protest votes eclipsed Biden’s margin of victory in 2020. This is not a case of a few far-left activists; it’s a pool of voters large enough to determine the November election. It’s a chorus of labor activists, leaders of prominent Black churches, young voters mobilizing their peers and sending millions of calls and letters to Congress, and increasingly, rank-and-file Democratic voters. 

Gov. Glenn Younkin (R-VA) signed a bill this week closing a loophole that had allowed minors to marry if they were emancipated, making Virginia the first state in the South to ban child marriage. In four states—California, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Mississippi—there is no minimum age for marriage at all. 

GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson went to Mar-a-Lago on Friday to kiss the ring of disgraced former president Donald Trump, and the two held a joint press conference on “election integrity” and promoted a bill that would ban undocumented Americans voting, something that is already illegal and also does not happen.

A new ruling from Argentina’s highest court holds Iran responsible for a fatal 1994 attack against the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, and called the event a “crime against humanity.” The decision opens the door for victims to seek justice. 

A January 6 defendant appealed his case all the way to the Supreme Court. If the Court’s conservative majority sides with him, convictions of hundreds of insurrectionists could be thrown out. 

After a nine-month investigation, European Union drug regulators found no link between diabetes and weight loss drugs like Wegovy and Ozempic and suicidal thoughts. 

The head of the FDA on Thursday suggested that lawmakers pass legislation that would force food manufacturers to test their products for lead, particularly those being imported from overseas. Big day for “Wait, we weren’t already doing that?!” news. 

After numerous failed attempts by his lawyers to delay the proceedings, jury selection begins on Monday for Donald Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial stemming from the hush money payment paid to adult film actress Stormy Daniels in 2016. Trump says he intends to testify. Hooooo doggy!