Crooked Media - What A Day: Chutkan ya do

While disgraced former president Donald Trump was scrambling to find a judge to help him pull off a January 6 cover-up, his supporters flooded several House Republicans with death threats for, let’s see here, voting in favor of better roads and clean drinking water. Bipartisanship has healed America!
 

• A federal appeals court has granted Trump’s frantic request to temporarily block the release of Trump White House records to the January 6 committee, delaying the National Archives’ first document dump from Friday until at least the end of the month. U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan had rejected a similar emergency motion on Wednesday night, after ruling earlier in the week that Trump’s executive-privilege claim didn’t hold water. The good news: Trump’s last-ditch request landed in front of a decidedly un-Trumpy panel, which has fast-tracked the appeal process itself. 
   
• Trump’s former aides continue to follow his lead. The White House has ratcheted up the pressure on former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to comply with his subpoena, notifying him in a Thursday letter that President Biden won’t assert executive privilege over the documents and testimony requested by the panel. Meadows’s lawyer replied that he “remains under the instructions of former President Trump to respect longstanding principles of executive privilege,” and will wait for the courts to decide.
   
• A more compelling form of pressure might be for the Justice Department to arrest Steve Bannon for defying a lawful subpoena, but it seems Attorney General Merrick Garland is still considering key questions like “did Bannon break the law?” and “is that, like, the worst, though?” Meanwhile, a conspicuously unarrested Bannon had Meadows on his podcast this week, where Meadows said that he thought 13 House Republicans should be stripped of their committee assignments for the high crime of voting for an infrastructure bill championed by Joe Biden.

Comments like that from Trump allies and GOP lawmakers have prompted a furious backlash from the MAGA base, completely divorced from the actual contents of the bill.
 

• Bannon and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) posted the office phone numbers of traitorous pro-highway Republicans on social media, setting off a wave of menacing calls. Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI) received a voicemail in which a caller said, “I hope you die. I hope everybody in your fucking family dies,” while calling him a “fucking piece of shit traitor.” Another caller instructed Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) to slit his wrists and “rot in hell.” Basically just the standard political rhetoric you’d expect around legislation to improve railroads and airports. 
   
• While GOP leaders have inflamed their own base against members who voted against the same kind of bill Trump tried to pass, they’ve made no move to hold Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) accountable for posting an anime video that depicted him killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (R-NY). A group of House Democrats will introduce a resolution to censure Gosar on Friday, and his own siblings are begging for someone to hold him accountable before his behavior gets worse, but it’s still crickets from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.

The right-wing flirtations with political violence that boiled over on January 6 haven’t gone anywhere in the months since; if anything, they’ve permeated deeper into what should be utterly uncontroversial areas of politics. Democrats and the Justice Department can either accept that as the country’s new normal or use every available tool to drive it out of the mainstream—there’s not much of a middle ground left.

Last year, your fingers signed up to be a part of Vote Save America, smashed the donate button, and texted volunteers. Now, thanks to that work, the fingers on the hand of one Joseph R. Biden will be signing a historic bipartisan infrastructure deal and more (hopefully). But the fingers on the other side have been hard at work drawing gerrymandered maps, sharing misinformation on social media, and voting in record numbers like we saw in Virginia and New Jersey . So we need to get in the game today! We’re less than a year away from the 2022 midterms, and the sooner organizers can begin having conversations with voters early about why next year’s elections are so important, the better. Can you help us get to $1 million by the end of this November? Head to votesaveamerica.com/donate today.

Speaking of latent political violence, there are a number of trends that suggest it could be about to get worse. (Thank you for subscribing to America’s cheeriest newsletter! We promise there is cool stuff further down.) For one thing, gun sales have been booming since the pandemic first hit, and at least 20 percent of gun purchasers in that time have been first-time buyers. For another, the Supreme Court looks poised to rule that states can’t stop people from carrying guns around in most public places. Combine ubiquitous guns with rising political extremism and homicide rates, and the next few months and years start to look less than ideal. Constitutional law and gun policy expert Adam Winkler suggests that with a Supreme Court this horny for the Second Amendment, gun-safety advocates should be less focused on trying to outlaw assault weapons and instead fight for better gun law enforcement, background checks, and community intervention—all things at the top of the Biden administration’s public safety agenda.

• Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), who hasn’t yet announced if he’ll run for reelection next year, has called on Wisconsin lawmakers to take over the state’s elections and disregard the bipartisan Elections Commission they established six years ago.
   
• Dominion Voting Systems has sued Fox Corp. in an effort to find out how deeply the Murdochs were involved in the network’s conspiracy-drenched, defamatory post-election coverage.
   
• A federal judge ruled on Wednesday that Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R-TX) ban on school mask mandates violates the Americans with Disabilities Act, freeing up local officials to set their own rules. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) said he would appeal the ruling.
   
• The judge in Kyle Rittenhouse’s trial took advantage of Veterans Day to make the jury applaud a defense witness, before nailing his audition for a host role at Fox News. 
   
• A federal judge has given final approval to a $626 million settlement for the victims of the Flint, MI, water crisis.
   
• A 2020 Trump White House memo on then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper included the following arguments for his firing: He banned the Confederate flag on military bases, said he wouldn’t do war crimes in Iran, pushed for “diversity and inclusion,” and wasn’t psyched enough about the trans military ban. Quite a bullet we’ve at least temporarily dodged!
   
• Rep. Mike Braun (R-IN) claimed he couldn’t answer questions about his alleged whopping campaign-finance violations because a key staffer had “vanished,” only for reporters to locate that staffer within minutes.
   
• F.W. de Klerk, South Africa’s last apartheid president, has died at 85.
   
• Christopher Walken destroyed a real Banksy painting on an episode of a BBC comedy show but keeps telling everyone he would've done it with or without the cameras there? And that "Banksy knows why"?

Thousands of migrants have found themselves trapped at the Poland-Belarus border in dire conditions, having been blocked by Poland from entering the E.U. Western leaders have accused Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko of orchestrating the crisis in retribution for sanctions, which Europe put in place after Lukashenko cracked down on dissidents. The E.U. has thus threatened new sanctions, in response to which Lukashenko threatened to choke off critical gas supplies from Russia into Europe, a major escalation. Meanwhile, the U.S. has warned European allies that Russia may be preparing to invade Ukraine, and U.S. officials suggested that Russia had coordinated the migrant crisis with Belarus in order to destabilize the region. Meanwhile^2, far-right groups held rallies across Poland on Thursday to mark the country’s Independence Day and yell about keeping the migrants out. Until there’s some resolution, people on the border are stuck in the freezing cold—at least eight people have died, and temperatures are dropping.

If you have investments, odds are high that your money has been winding up in places you would never put it on purpose. Places like Mitch McConnell’s campaign coffers. Here’s the problem: A lot of Americans own S&P 500 index funds—these are funds made up of the 500 largest U.S. publicly traded companies available, and they collectively contain over $1.5 trillion dollars of Americans’ retirement money.

Unfortunately, when you buy an S&P 500 index fund, you’re buying stock in the following companies:
 

• AT&T, which is already back supporting the election objectors in Congress, as well as the GOP sponsors of Texas’s abortion ban and voter-suppression law. It’s also a top donor to Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham.

• ExxonMobil, which has misled the public about the dangers of climate change and spent huge amounts on Facebook ads to get Donald Trump reelected in 2020.

• Halliburton, one of the nation’s biggest defense contractors, which has funneled millions to the GOP.

• Lockheed Martin, which is one the largest weapons manufacturers in the world and one of Lindsey Graham’s top contributors.

The list goes on. But before you stuff all of your savings in your mattress and call it a day, you should know about DEMZ. 

DEMZ is the first investment product that allows you to get similar performance and exposure you would expect from the S&P 500,  without all the Mitch McConnell. It only includes companies who have made over 75% of their political contributions to Democratic causes and candidates. Since launching in November of 2020, DEMZ has outperformed the S&P 500 by 7 percent.

You can finally put your money where your vote is, even on Wall Street. Look for the DEMZ ticker wherever you invest, or visit DEMZ.fund to learn more. 

Scientists at Northwestern University say they may have found a breakthrough treatment to reverse paralysis in humans. 

Blood pressure drugs could slash the risk of developing type 2 diabetes, a large study found.

London’s Thames River, declared “biologically dead” in 1957, is once again teeming with wildlife, including sharks.

MoviePass is coming back, baby.