1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6 3.Nc3 Bg7 4.e4 d6 5.Be2 0-0 6.Bg5 h6 7.Be3 Nbd7 8.Qd2 Kh7 9.h4 e5 10.d5 Nc5 11.f3 a5 12.g4 Ng8 13.0-0-0 Bd7 14.Nh3 c6 15.dxc6 Bxc6 16.Ng5+ 1-0>

<The family of Latino civil rights legend Cesar Chavez is doing all it can to stop conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from co-opting the activist’s legacy for his presidential campaign.

Kennedy, whose campaign has largely been propped up and promoted by a right-wing megadonor and conservative media outlets, appears intent on winning over liberal voters — particularly Black and Latino voters — seen as key to President Joe Biden’s electoral chances this fall. On the campaign trail, he’s attempted this by shamelessly glomming on to the political legacies some of his family members have established, including his uncle, President John F. Kennedy; and his father, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.

Most of the Kennedy family have backed President Biden's reelection. And RFK, Jr. has repeatedly been denounced by his relatives for using the family name to fuel his campaign. That was the case when he promoted a Super Bowl ad supporting his candidacy that was modeled on a JFK ad from 1960. Now, Kennedy’s name-dropping is being bashed by the Chavez family, too. The activist's son Fernando and other members of the family denounced a “Viva Kennedy24” event planned around Cesar Chavez Day that touted Chavez as “a good friend of RFK and RFK, Jr.” and suggested the three were aligned politically.

As the Los Angeles Times reported:

The sons are endorsing Biden and claim their dad would've done the same. And this is just the latest example of dubious clout-chasing and name-dropping from a Kennedy campaign that’s been disturbingly reliant on both.

Whether invoking his dad’s name, co-opting Cesar Chavez’s activism or palling around with Black rappers, Kennedy has tried to amass political clout on the strength of his associations, rather than his actual policy platform. To me, this is a cheap gimmick meant to mask the fact that he’s on the record espousing political stances that would harm many Black and brown people, if they haven't already.

That's a point U.S. Virgin Islands Del. Stacey Plaskett made last year in an MSNBC op-ed criticizing Kennedy’s anti-vaccine conspiracism.

She wrote:

The underlying story of Kennedy's candidacy is pretty grim if you ask me. Four years after a deadly pandemic ravaged Black and brown communities — mainly due to poor vaccination rates — one of the biggest profiteers and peddlers of anti-vaccine conspiracy theories has launched a dubious presidential campaign targeting the very communities his lies helped injure. I can't help but think about Kizzmekia Corbett, the brilliant, Black infectious disease expert who led the development of the first Covid-19 vaccine — only for a wealthy, white Kennedy heir to peddle lies framing her crowning achievement as part of some nefarious plot.

Even that doesn’t fully encapsulate the danger Kennedy’s policies pose to Black and brown people, despite what his various name-drops may suggest. He’s also advocated for the U.S. government to take a “break” from studying infectious diseases, an idea that would likely devastate nonwhite communities disproportionately affected by these diseases. He’s supported a 15-week national abortion ban (such bans have been shown to affect Black and brown people disproportionately) — and only tried to back away from it after receiving backlash.

He’s embraced right-wing rhetoric around parents’ choosing school curricula, which has been used to ban library books and classroom discussions about racism and the history of nonwhite Americans. He’s shared a platform with and been touted by Dennis Prager, whose organization, PragerU, has been tapped to create school lesson plans whitewashing the United States’ racist history. Kennedy even opposes online content moderation — the kind used to police online hate speech and disinformation — because this moderation leads social media platforms to limit the spread of his anti-vaccine propaganda.

If Kennedy were to actually say these things on the campaign trail, it likely wouldn't go over well with Black and brown voters. We have every reason to believe these policies would endanger Black and brown people if acted upon. But Kennedy seems intent on masking that fact by associating himself with figures whose politics he thinks Black and brown folks do support. And he apparently hopes none of us can tell the difference.>

Had to know this mental giant was bound to muck it up.

<The battle for Trump-skeptical Republican voters isn’t just about the suburbs.

It’s true that the hundreds of thousands of GOP primary voters who voted against former President Donald Trump this year were concentrated in highly educated, suburban areas that have swung blue over the past decade.

But a POLITICO analysis shows there’s also a significant bloc of voters who did not want Trump in more exurban, red-leaning counties — the kinds of places that were skeptical of Trump in the 2016 GOP primary and, while largely voting for him in the 2016 and 2020 general elections, have remained somewhat resistant to his takeover of the Republican Party.

The analysis of GOP presidential primary results from more than 1,000 counties shows warning signs for Trump, especially as Republican voters continued to vote against him in closed primaries after he clinched the nomination. And it makes clear that, while independents and crossover voters may have boosted former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley in some primaries, a chunk of true Republican voters still wished for someone else to be the party’s nominee.

“You hear a lot of moderate Republicans now who say that they’ll never vote for Trump again,” said Parker Fairbairn, county GOP chair in Emmet County, Michigan, on the northern end of the state’s Lower Peninsula, where Trump won 55 percent of the vote in the 2020 general election. In last month’s primary, he got two-thirds of the vote there.

What distinguishes Emmet County and similar geographies from the other suburban ones is their broader politics. These aren’t the kinds of suburbs on the outskirts of major cities, where wealthy, educated professionals have already fled the Republican Party.

They’re farther away from urban areas. They’re less densely populated, and they have fewer voters with college degrees. These places — which include North Carolina’s Republican-leaning exurbs, and conservative but less Trump-inclined counties several hours north of Michigan’s major cities — still vote predominantly for Republicans, both at the presidential and local levels. In 2016, when both parties held contested primaries, the Republican voters in these counties backed candidates like Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) over Trump, and in the general election they voted for Trump at lower rates than the deep-red rural areas.

Republicans are banking on the fact that partisanship usually wins out. This is far from the first contentious primary to leave bruised egos and hurt feelings, and usually the vast majority of voters come home to their party’s presidential nominee eventually. By Election Day, voters tend to return to their partisan camps.

And the skepticism of Trump doesn’t mean Biden has an easy road. Voters looking for what Fairbairn described as “commonsense conservatism” aren’t likely to find it with the incumbent Democratic president, either. And Trump could benefit from a political environment where polls have repeatedly shown a majority of American voters are dissatisfied with the state of the economy and the direction of the country.

“The cost of living has just skyrocketed. So I think Trump has that going for him,” said Fairbairn, the Emmet County chair.

But in a close election fought on the margins, even small shifts matter. Republicans’ success at bringing those voters back into the fold will help determine whether Trump ousts Biden from the White House. Democrats’ ability to draw away even a small percentage of the non-Trump GOP voters — or, at the very least, convince them to stay home — can help keep him there.

That push and pull sets the stage for a battle over the hundreds of thousands of non-Trump primary voters. Biden’s campaign has been overt in its overtures, including releasing an ad on Friday that featured a string of Trump’s insults of Haley and implored her supporters to join his campaign instead. If Democrats can buck historical trends, such voters could play a particularly outsize role in deciding swing states: Candidates other than Trump got at least one quarter of the Republican primary vote across more than 60 counties across North Carolina, Michigan and New Hampshire.

In Georgia, which held several weeks of early voting before Haley dropped out, Trump struggled among early voters in key areas, including Cobb County, a longtime GOP stronghold that has swung sharply toward Democrats over the past two presidential elections.

And in Arizona and Florida, two states with closed Republican primaries that voted after Trump became the party’s presumptive nominee, candidates other than the former president still got around 20 percent of the vote.....>

<....“We will pick up a few of these Republicans, I believe that,” said Sam Edney, Democratic county chair in North Carolina’s Transylvania County, a county southwest of Asheville where Trump got 67 percent of the GOP primary vote this year.

“I also hope a substantial number simply don’t vote in the Trump and Mark Robinson races, that will help Democrats as well,” he added, referencing the Republican gubernatorial nominee, who is an ally of the former president. “You know, it’s politics.”

The challenge for Democrats is overcoming the partisan polarization that has come to dominate elections, and Republican voters’ deep skepticism of Biden. The reality is that many Republican primary voters are, in matters of ideology and policy, closer to Trump than the Democratic president. That makes crossing party lines a tough sell, despite the aversion toward Trump that Democrats are hoping to capitalize on.

“Republicans’ substantive policy differences with President Biden’s administration vastly outweigh any objections there may be with President Trump’s unique personality and approach,” said North Carolina state Sen. Tim Moffitt, a Republican who represents a western North Carolina district that includes Henderson County, in an email to POLITICO.

One figure exemplifying that: New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, who endorsed Haley and traversed his home state arguing a GOP ticket headed by Trump would lead to major losses for the party. He has now backed Trump.

“For anyone to act surprised that when the contest is left between President Biden and President Trump — that, ‘how dare Governor Sununu support President Trump?’ — at the end of the day, Gov. Sununu is a solid Republican,” said Jason Grosky, GOP chair in the state’s swingy Rockingham County, along the border with Massachusetts. “What else was he going to do? Vote for President Biden? Zero percent chance."....>

<....Of course, some of the Haley voters weren’t really Trump voters — or even Republicans — in the first place. In states with open primaries, some committed Democrats crossed party lines for the opportunity to vote against Trump in the primary, alongside independents and moderates who favored Biden in 2020 and voted for Haley, but fall firmly in the category of anti-Trump voters. Those types of voters should be easier pickups for Democrats, but would not improve Biden’s margins compared to four years ago.

“Where President Trump gets hurt is educated, suburban women and independents,” said Michigan state Rep. Mark Tisdel, a Republican and Haley backer who represents a swath of Detroit suburbs won by Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2022. “If he's going to win this election, he's going to have to find a way to bring those soft Republicans and those independents back to our side of the ledger.” (Tisdel said there was an “overwhelming probability” he himself would vote for a straight Republican ticket in November, “no matter who's at the top.”)

But Haley’s vote share, particularly in Republican areas, also reflected that some tried-and-true Republicans wanted to avoid Trump as the nominee.

Those voters are the target for groups like the super PAC Primary Pivot, which relaunched this month as Haley Voters for Biden after the former South Carolina governor dropped out.

Republican voters would be “the most difficult group” to win over, said the group’s senior adviser, Robert Schwartz. He said the super PAC has learned some early lessons as it works to refine its messaging, including not talking about Jan. 6, which “most conservative voters don’t like hearing about even if they think it was wrong.” Schwartz said messaging on things like “loyalty to the military, or talking about NATO and being anti-Russia” are more appealing topics.

But most important is reaching these voters soon.

“There’s still a lot of raw feelings about how Nikki Haley and her family were treated, and about the way that MAGA and Donald Trump are treating Nikki Haley supporters and the whole ‘permanently barred from MAGA,’” he said. “As we get closer to the election, those kinds of feelings of resentment are going to fade away. … We want to lock in that feeling of resentment and disgust toward the way Trump treated them.”

He acknowledged “a significant amount of” the non-Trump GOP primary voters will end up voting for the former president in November. But, he argued, “This year is different than most years in terms of just a deep enmity of these people toward coming back home to Trump again.”

Democrats hope so. Even if voting for Biden may be out of the question for some, Democrats know that those who would otherwise vote GOP choosing to stay home or cast their ballots for a third party would also improve the party’s chances.

“We’ve got to educate these Republicans who are disgruntled with Trump,” said Edney, the Democratic chair in Transylvania County, North Carolina.

Those voters will also be a particular target in newer battlegrounds like Cabarrus County, North Carolina — a rapidly growing Charlotte exurb that Trump won by a bit under 10 points in the 2020 general election that is among the counties where the Biden campaign is already opening field offices. Last cycle was the first time in more than four decades that a Republican presidential candidate didn’t win by double digits there. And in the state’s GOP primary this month, Trump got 73 percent of the vote.

“We have to chase every vote,” said Mackenzie Reedybacon, chair of the Cabarrus County Democratic Party. “Every single one of those 27 percent of folks who didn’t vote for him is someone worth talking to.”>

Evil must be stopped.

Here's hoping.

<Retired American generals vehemently say that no, Donald Trump cannot deploy SEAL Team 6 to kill a political rival. Gun groups howl that the United States is turning into Communist China. And a convicted Jan. 6 rioter warns that President Joe Biden could someday get sued over the death of a jogger in Georgia.

These are among the 18 various groups that shared their wisdom with the Supreme Court earlier this month, filing amicus briefs on the same day that Trump told the high court why he should be able to dodge a federal prosecution for trying to overturn the 2020 election on false pretenses.

Department of Justice Special Counsel Jack Smith’s election interference case against Trump has finally reached the nation’s highest judicial authority, which will determine whether the business tycoon can be put on trial. The timing of the nine justices’ eventual decision will determine if the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee is to face trial in court before Election Day in November.

But ahead of oral arguments next month, the Supreme Court is already getting inundated with all kinds of opinions about the main question in the case: whether a former president enjoys immunity for actions made while at the White House.

The Daily Beast reviewed the litany of uninvited legal arguments spanning 599 pages, ranging from breathless reiterations of Trump’s claims to head-turning warnings. Yet all bear the signs of a historic case that could determine the fate of the election, if not American democracy.

The most unusual and unexpected amicus brief comes from three former high-ranking military leaders: Retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, who served as Trump’s own acting national security adviser; Robert Wilkie, who served as Trump’s Veterans Affairs Department secretary; and retired Lt. Gen. William “Jerry” Boykin, who once led the Army’s elite commandos in Delta Force and Green Berets.

The three former military men felt it necessary to join together and address—in public and at the national level—one of the crazier Trump legal arguments: that Trump’s immunity from criminal prosecution is so beyond question that it would allow him to order the assassination of his political enemies.

“No—the president cannot order SEAL Team Six to assassinate his political rival and have the military carry out such an order,” they clarified, marking the first time former military leadership has ever had to utter such a phrase in court.

The trio went further, pointing out that a Reagan-era executive order already prohibits anyone acting on behalf of the United States government from taking part in an assassination. They dedicated a significant portion of their 18-page court filing to making clear that military officers would be legally justified in refusing to even carry out an official order from their commander-in-chief, an assertion rarely made by military brass—and one that underlies just how stark their concerns are at this point.

“That a person is a political rival of the president is neither a justification nor an excuse for an unlawful killing. And deliberately carrying out an order to murder such a person would be acting upon a premeditated design to kill or an intent to kill. Therefore, any officer engaged in murder on the orders of a president would be subject to the death penalty or life in prison—and the officer would know it,” they wrote.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of the other amici curiae—the so-called “friends of the court” who weighed in to give the Supreme Court their two cents—largely sided with Trump.

The right-wing nonprofit America’s Future—which screened a bonkers QAnon Hollywood conspiracy “documentary” at Mar-a-Lago earlier this week—joined forces with Gun Owners of America and similar firearms associations to warn the high court that Smith’s prosecution was making the United States look more like China, Russia, or Zimbabwe.

“The prosecution of President Trump by the Biden Administration has a parallel to a recent event in Communist China,” they wrote, recalling the way former Chinese President Hu Jintao has vanished from public view ever since he was mysteriously escorted out of a public ceremony where he had been sitting next to his successor, Xi Jinping.

The United States is heading down that same route, they warned, lamenting “the explosion of lawfare” aimed at Trump for doing what they deemed totally sensible political speech—an argument that rests, in part, on the gun-toting petitioners’ continued rejection of the 2020 election results. They referenced Trump’s “supposed” defeat in Arizona and Georgia.....>

<....The real danger here, though, is that while Trump is currently polling strong, the gun groups concede that “the effect of a conviction may be very different and could determine the outcome of the election.”

But it wasn’t the conglomeration of Second Amendment enthusiasts that made a veiled threat over the high court decision. That came from an Alabama electrical engineer who’s become a political financier.

In his court filing, Shaun McCutcheon describes himself as “a successful, self-made American businessman and constitutional patriot.” And he warned Supreme Court justices that the country’s MAGA loyalists aren’t going to suddenly start trusting the U.S. court system to select fair-minded jurors.

“The former President’s tens of millions of supporters cannot reasonably be expected to accept the typical legal fictions of voir dire under such extreme circumstances,” his lawyer wrote.

McCutcheon assigns malicious intent to the Special Counsel’s decision to indict Trump in the largely liberal District of Columbia—never mind that the U.S. Constitution’s Sixth Amendment ensures that a person will be subjected to a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury drawn from the district where his alleged crime was committed, which in this case was the White House.

“A prosecutor appointed by a partisan presidential appointee of the opposing political party may prosecute a former president in a hand-picked venue deeply hostile to that former president, his beliefs, political expression, and legacy,” his lawyer wrote.

While the Supreme Court received various interpretations of presidential immunity that cast the Special Counsel’s investigations as a severe threat to the functions of the commander-in-chief’s job, the sharpest example came from someone who knows a thing or two about Trump’s insurrection.

In his brief, Treniss Evans argued that if Trump can be put on trial for allegedly masterminding a months-long and multi-pronged attack on U.S. democracy, then President Biden could be held personally responsible for the death in February of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley, given that an allegedly undocumented Venezuelan man was arrested for her killing.

“If a President doesn’t have immunity from prosecution for his actions, what prevents Georgia murder victim Laken Riley’s family from suing Joe Biden for allowing her illegal migrant murderer into the USA? Or what if hundreds of families all sued, seriatim?” his lawyer wrote, using the Latin phrase that means “one-by-one.”

Evans made the filing through his “legal advocacy group,” which bears the emotionally charged name Condemned USA. He trivialized Trump’s 2020 election fraud claims, but then went on to assert that Trump and his followers can’t possibly be accused of trying to stop certification of the election with a violent riot because technically Jan. 6, 2021, was just the official counting of the already certified votes before Congress.

The Supreme Court justices will get the sense that this topic is deeply personal for Evans. After all, his brief says right up top that “Mr. Evans has been investigating and reporting events of January 6th since January 6th, 2021. He was present at the Capitol on that day.”

In reality, he was in the violent crowd, held a bullhorn, and entered the Capitol—only to be identified by a Facebook tipster, arrested in Texas two months after the insurrection, and eventually sentenced to three years’ probation. To convince the federal judge to go easy on him, his other lawyer wrote that “Mr. Evans is quite self-reproving, sincerely remorseful, and duly contrite. He is embarrassed of this criminal conduct and the shame he has brought upon himself and his family. He has entered his plea of guilty voluntarily.”

But his March 19 brief before the Supreme Court doesn’t exactly hint at that remorse, nor does it morph into any critique of the man who called on him and others to show up that day and march on the Capitol Building....>

<....Yet another legal advocacy firm asked the Supreme Court to give even more deference to Trump for the actions that led up to the disaster at the tail end of his presidency. The Christian Family Coalition Florida, a conservative Miami group that recently lent its support to Gov. Ron DeSantis’ crackdown on transgender kids in girls’ sports teams, reduced Trump’s election interference efforts to merely “core political speech.” And it would give future politicians carte blanche to lie—and follow through with those lies—regardless of their claim’s merit.

“For the sake of the presidency and the nation, criminal liability cannot turn on a mere factual dispute over whether an ex-president’s communications in challenging an election were ‘knowingly false,’” a lawyer for the group wrote.

In this Trump case, justices also heard from a favorite villain of the American progressive movement: Citizens United, the nonprofit behind the Supreme Court’s 2010 landmark decision that opened the door to having corporations spend unlimited funds on elections.

The group joined with two former U.S. Attorneys General: the Reagan administration’s Edwin Meese III, and the George W. Bush administration’s Michael B. Mukasey. Together, they tried to strip the current team of federal prosecutors going after Trump from any legitimacy.

They argued that Smith “wields tremendous power, effectively answerable to no one, by design.” And they contend that’s something he can’t do without the Senate’s confirmation. Instead, they say, AG Merrick Garland should have taken the same approach he did with the separate Hunter Biden investigation and tap an existing, Senate-confirmed federal prosecutor in charge of a regional office, like Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss.

The two conservative former AGs and the nonprofit also claim that most cabinet officials have the authority to appoint officers—minus the Justice Department, a proposition that would give the heads of Agriculture, Education and Homeland Security departments more leeway than the nation’s attorney general. And they warn that Garland’s actions could “create by regulation an entire shadow Department of Justice.”

But leave it to a consortium of 18 state attorneys general—all pro-Trump Republicans led by Alabama AG Steve Marshall—to make the one point everyone can probably agree on.

“If he had not been president, none of this would be happening,” they wrote.>

<twin stalker one> wants to cry discrimination?

Guess what? Nothing forces him to read and/or play whistle blower here.

<The wave of retirement announcements and sudden resignations by members of the 118th Congress may soon be spreading to lawmakers' staff as well.

Senior-level aides on both sides of the aisle are becoming increasingly frustrated with the ossified, hyper-partisan climate in Washington, DC, according to a Washington Post analysis. The Post's Paul Kane attributed staffers' disgust with working on Congress to not just "pandemic fallout, ranging from partisan battles over mask mandates to the long closure of the buildings to the public," but also "the ongoing toxicity since the January 2021 attack on the Capitol."

"Congress is broken," the nonprofit Congressional Management Foundation (CMF) stated in its 2024 "State of the Congress" report. The report noted that nearly half of senior aides in both chambers of Congress are considering leaving their jobs because of "heated rhetoric from the other party."

"Only 12% of Democrats and 31% of Republicans agreed that 'Congress is currently functioning as a democratic legislature should,'" the group wrote. "There has been no change or improvement of this metric since 2022."

Despite measures in recent years to increase the budgets of the 535 congressional offices from roughly $500 million to more than $800 million per year — thus increasing the pay of the most senior-level staffers to roughly $200,000 per year (elected members themselves have been making the same $170,000 salary since 2009) — tensions remain high. Nonprofit congressional resource Legistorm, which tracks hiring in the House and Senate, reported that staff retention rates are still at near-record lows this century despite a slight 4% year-over-year increase.

An identical number of staffers for both Democratic and Republican members of Congress said that the mental and emotional toll from their jobs was also a significant source of stress. Kane wrote that four in 10 staffers frequently experienced "direct insulting or threatening messages" while on the job.

"The physical and psychological toll of this place cannot be understated," an unnamed senior aide to a House Democrat told CMF staff. "We are in danger as a nation."

Congress' lack of productivity could also be a contributing factor to staffers' weariness of their jobs. In January, ABC reported that the 118th Congress is on track to be the least productive meeting of the federal legislature in decades, with fewer than three dozen bills passed in its first year. 2023 marked the first time since the Great Depression that a meeting of Congress passed so few bills in its first year.

"This is the most ineffective congress that we have seen," Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Illinois) said at the time.

According to Ballotpedia's count, a whopping 50 members of the 118th Congress have announced they will not be seeking another term in office. This includes eight US Senators (five Democrats, two Republicans, one independent) and 42 members of the House of Representatives (23 Democrats, 19 Republicans). The latest departures are Rep. Annie Kuster (D-New Hampshire), and Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wisconsin). Gallagher not only announced he wouldn't be running for another term, but would leave the House entirely on April 19.>

1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6 3.Nc3 Bg7 4.e4 d6 5.f3 Nc6 6.Nge2 a6 7.Be3 Rb8 8.a3 O-O 9.Qd2 Re8 10.b4 Bd7 11.Rd1 b5 12.cxb5 axb5 13.d5 Ne5 14.Nd4 e6 15.dxe6 fxe6 16.Ndxb5 d5 17.f4 Neg4 18.e5 Nh5 19.Nd4 Qh4+ 20.g3 Nxg3 21.Bf2 Nxf2 22.Qxf2 Nf5 23.Nxf5 Qxf2+ 24.Kxf2 gxf5 25.Rg1 Kh8 26.Ne2 c5 27.bxc5 Bf8 28.Rc1 Rec8 29.Rg3 Bxc5+ 30.Kg2 d4 31.Ng1 Rb2+ 32.Kh3 Rf2 33.Rf3 Ra2 34.Ba6 Rc7 35.Ne2 Rd2 36.Rb3 Kg7 37.Kg3 Ba4 38.Rf3 Bc2 39.Ra1 Be4 40.Rb3 d3 41.Nc3 Bd4 42.Nxe4 fxe4 43.Rh1 Kh6 44.Bb7 Bf2+ 45.Kh3 e3 46.Kg2 Bh4+ 47.Kh3 e2 48.Kxh4 Rd1 49.Rxd3 Rxh1 0-1>

<The arc of the moral universe — the one that is supposedly long and bending toward justice — seems finally to be edging closer to its mark.

A series of events in recent days — the defenestration of Ronna McDaniel, threatened disbarment of John Eastman, capitulation of Kari Lake in a defamation lawsuit — suggests a reckoning is upon us.

It’s taken a while. Too long to satisfy those who would rather justice be swift than sure.

But the humiliation visited on McDaniel, the sanctioning of Eastman and Lake, as well as the jailing of Peter Navarro, the Clinton-Democrat-turned-Trump-flunky, all bring a welcome and much-needed measure of accountability.

Perhaps their punishment will deter others who might similarly endeavor to overthrow a free and fairly conducted election, affronting the country's values and assaulting our democracy with their deceit.

The four differ in their deeds. But all are sprung from the same poisoned seed: Donald Trump's lie about the 2020 election, which he lost, clearly and indisputably, to Joe Biden.

McDaniel, while she was head of the Republican National Committee, not only helped spread Trump's lie but sought to pressure officials in Michigan — her home state — to withhold certification of Biden's victory there.

Her reward was a $300,000-a-year contract to serve as a political commentator for NBC, which soiled itself in a misguided attempt to bring political diversity to its election coverage.

The network backed off and dumped McDaniel only after a remarkable on-air revolt by several of its marquee personalities, who rightly questioned the platforming of a fabulist and accessory to attempted election sabotage.

As MSNBC host Rachel Maddow aptly put it, "You wouldn’t hire ... a mobster to work at a DA’s office, right?”

The swift dispatch of McDaniel was not a matter of silencing a conservative voice, as some would have it. Rather, it was taking back a megaphone from a known liar whose every utterance would — and should — have been called into question.

(A whole other issue is the amount of money that was shelled out to McDaniel not long after NBC made cuts to its news division — a reflection of an industry preference for elevating partisans, Democratic and Republican, over journalists.)

Eastman's comeuppance came a day after McDaniel's unceremonious exit, when a California State Bar judge recommended the attorney lose his law license for helping devise a cockamamie scheme to keep Trump in office despite his election defeat.

It's one thing to provide zealous counsel, said the judge, Yvette Roland, whose recommendation of disbarment goes to the state Supreme Court. “However, Eastman’s inaccurate assertions were lies that cannot be justified as zealous advocacy,” she concluded.

Indeed, though it would have been nice had the judge gone beyond the $10,000 fine imposed on Eastman, which seems a pittance considering the damage wrought by the former Orange County law school dean.

It's not as though he were testing some novel theory in moot court, or practicing "creative" lawyering, as he claimed in a self-pitying podcast interview.

Eastman set out to override and invalidate the judgment of more than 80 million Americans who voted for Biden and cast their ballots with full faith the results would be honored, just as they had been for the previous 200-plus years in America.

(For those members of the what-about chorus, yawping that Hillary Clinton and Stacey Abrams questioned the legitimacy of their defeats, there is no comparison between griping on the lecture circuit and mounting a spurious, full-frontal legal attack. Not to mention inciting a violent mob to storm the Capitol and prevent lawmakers from certifying the election.)

Happily, one of Eastman's fellow henchman, Navarro, is stewing in prison after refusing to testify about the Jan. 6 insurrection and his plan to keep Congress from tallying Biden's electoral college victory.

The four-month jail hitch is just the latest adornment on Navarro's unusual career path from environmentalist San Diego mayoral candidate and Democratic congressional hopeful to fall-on-his-sword MAGA loyalist....>

<....Finally, there is Arizona's feckless Kari Lake.

She ran for governor in 2022 as a Trump wannabe and kept up the act for months after losing, falsely claiming she, too, was a victim of election fraud.

Her fakery resulted in a defamation suit filed by Maricopa County's Republican elections chief, which Lake — now running for U.S. Senate — has ceased to contest. Last week, she asked a judge to skip the trial and go straight to assessing damages.

Here's hoping for a huge drain on Lake's bank account, followed by a resounding rejection by Arizona voters.

Of course, the impresario of all the destruction and duplicity — Trump — has yet to face any criminal penalties.

That moment may be nearing, as a New York City jury is scheduled next month to take up the matter surrounding hush money Trump paid adult film performer Stormy Daniels to cover up an alleged one-night stand.

It's tempting to turn away and be spared the yucky details. But it's important to remember the context.

The panicked payment to Daniels came after Trump was heard boasting on the infamous "Access Hollywood" tape about committing sexual assault, which pushed his candidacy to the brink of collapse in the final weeks of the 2016 campaign. The additional revelation of an extramarital affair could have cost Trump the White House; voters certainly deserved to know the facts.

Unfortunately, other criminal cases, involving the former president's efforts to overturn the election and his negligent handling of classified documents after leaving the White House, may not reach a jury before November.

That leaves it up to voters to deliver their verdict on Trump, which should be a clear and unequivocal thrashing at the polls.

But for now, at least, there's satisfaction in holding to account at least some of the fraudsters and cheats who enabled his rampant wrongdoing.

At long last.>

<The Daily Caller has retracted and removed an article falsely accusing the Biden administration of banning religious designs on Easter eggs submitted to a White House art contest.

The retraction comes days after the right-wing media ecosystem ran wild with the story (alongside misleading claims about Transgender Day of Visibility), claiming that it was further proof of President Joe Biden’s supposed war on Christianity.

Reacting to a flyer sent out for the “Celebrating National Guard Families” contest at this year’s White House Easter Egg Roll, The Daily Caller reported that the competition “explicitly stipulated that egg designs not feature any ‘religious symbols’ on the Christian holiday.” The Caller’s article helped launch a days-long outrage cycle throughout conservative media, culminating in obsessive coverage across Fox News.

Following that backlash, however, the American Egg Board, which helps coordinate the annual White House event, explained that the “guideline language referenced in recent news reports has consistently applied to the board since its founding” in 1978. Therefore, the restrictions had been in place since the Carter administration, including Donald Trump’s term in office.

“While the Caller did not explicitly state at any point that the rule was new, this additional context rendered the main thrust of the article misleading to readers, who could reasonably have come to the conclusion that the rule was new,” the Daily Caller explained in its retraction. “With that additional context included, the news value of the article was significantly diminished, leading the senior leadership at the Caller to the decision to retract,” the conservative outlet added. “We sincerely regret the error and are taking the necessary steps to ensure similar mistakes can be avoided in the future.”

While the Caller has backed away from its story, Fox News has continued to stoke outrage over the false claim that Biden outright banned religious Easter eggs. “They were strictly prohibited,” Fox News star Sean Hannity exclaimed Monday night. “You can’t make this up! You really can’t. This is simply hostility towards religion.”>

<Concern has been raised over iHeartMedia, the broadcaster of the Verdict With Ted Cruz podcast, paying $630,850 to the Truth and Courage PAC which supports the Texas Senator.

Data from the Federal Election Commission shows iHeartMedia has donated a total of $630,850 to Truth and Courage PAC since March 2023, constituting around a third of its revenue since the beginning of that year. Critics are calling on Senate and federal election authorities to investigate this as a possible ethics violation while Cruz's team has said he has done nothing wrong.

Cruz is expected to face a tough election challenge in November from Democrat Colin Allred, a former NFL player who currently serves in the House of Representatives. In 2018, Cruz only narrowly defeated Democratic challenger Beto O'Rourke by less than three percent of the vote, and his seat is widely regarded as competitive in 2024.

In 2022, iHeartMedia acquired Verdict With Ted Cruz, a podcast the Texas Republican launched in 2020 to discuss Trump's first impeachment. Cruz's team has said he isn't paid by iHeartMedia for hosting duties. As iHeartMedia employs lobbyists, it would be impermissible under Senate rules for Cruz to accept gifts except of "nominal value" from the company, especially given his position on the Senate Commerce Committee, the Houston Chronicle reported.

Ted Cruz Payments Raise Alarm Bells
Newsweek contacted Senator Ted Cruz and iHeartMedia for comment at 3 a.m. ET on Tuesday by email, along with Truth and Courage PAC via messages on Facebook and Instagram. This article will be updated if a comment is received.

Rachel Nelson, who serves as iHeartMedia's vice-president of public relations, told the newspaper that the company's payments to Truth and Courage PAC are "associated with those advertising sales" for his podcast. "Sen. Cruz volunteers his time to host this podcast and isn't compensated for it," she said.

In 2022, the Campaign Legal Center, which states it fights "for every American's right to participate in the democratic process," filed a complaint with the Senate Ethics Committee over the pro-Cruz PAC receiving payments from iHeartMedia. This was later dismissed with the committee concluding Cruz had abided by lobbying regulations.

However, the latest revelations about the extent of the financial relationship between iHeartMedia and Truth and Courage PAC have sparked calls for a fresh investigation. Shanna Ports, a senior legal counsel for the Campaign Legal Center, said the new revelations raise "the question of whether this is an unlawful contribution."

Ports argued Cruz could have acted illegally if he solicited donations of over $5,000 to his PAC, which federal officeholders are prohibited from doing under federal law.

Robert Maguire, research director at the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics watchdog, also raised concerns about Cruz's relationship with iHeartMedia.

He said: "Volunteering generally means you're doing something expecting no personal benefit, but Cruz here is clearly benefiting from the ad revenue that is being generated by his iHeartMedia show."

Speaking to The Houston Chronicle, a spokesperson for Cruz said the senator "appears on Verdict three times a week for free."

"He does this to pull back the veil on the corrupt inner workings of Washington none of which ever get fairly covered. How convenient that the mainstream media and the cogs in the machine of the Biden-Pelosi Democrat Party want this to stop."

A recent Marist poll of 1,227 Texas adults put Cruz ahead of Allred by 51 percent to 45 percent, with 53 percent of those surveyed saying they'd never heard of the Democratic challenger.>

<The troubled Republican Party of Arizona is coming clean about its disastrous finances.

Party officials acknowledged having “a shortage of cash-flow and donations up until the end of 2023,” according to a filing with the Federal Election Commission this week that Raw Story reviewed.

The Arizona GOP also told federal regulators that “rent for multiple months of 2023” wasn’t paid until January of this year.

The admissions follow the FEC questioning the Arizona GOP about its finances in a letter last month.

The FEC asked about the committee’s administrative, salary and insurance expenses as reported in mandated federal filings from October, November and December.

The back-and-forth between the Arizona GOP and FEC underscore the party’s broader turmoil in the midst of an election year where Arizona is a presidential swing state — with Democratic President Joe Biden and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump equally primed to win.

The Arizona GOP voted last month to sell the $1.9 million Phoenix headquarters it bought nine months ago.

Meanwhile, in January, Jeff DeWit resigned as chair after a secret audio recording leaked of him appearing to offer a bribe for fervent Trump backer and U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake to leave the race. Lake has been mentioned as a potential pick by Trump to be his vice presidential running mate.

Kelli Ward, DeWit’s predecessor, spent money lavishly and, some said, foolishly during her time as chair.

Gina Swoboda, the current chair, was an organizer of the 2020 Trump campaign in Arizona who promoted major discrepancies in voting that were later proven false.

She is tasked with getting the committee back on track in what could be a pivotal state in this year’s presidential election.

In its response to the FEC this week, the Arizona GOP said staff salaries weren’t included in the federal filings in question because nobody spent more than 25 percent of their time on federal elections — as opposed to state races, which the FEC does not regulate.

Money, including the “shortage of cash flow” mentioned in the FEC filing, left the Arizona GOP trailing the Democrats by a large margin in fundraising last year.

In March, however, Swoboda, told television station KPHO, “The fundraising’s going well. I have no concerns.”

Asked by KPHO about the committee’s first-quarter FEC report, which will be made public soon and will show specific fundraising numbers, Swoboda said, “You’re gonna have to wait and see.”>

<[Event "Boylston CC Championship"] [Site "Boston Mass"]
[Date "1996.??.??"]
[Round "1"]
[White "Rasin, Jacob"]
[Black "Cherniack, Alex"]
[Result "1-0"]
[ECO "A21"]
[WhiteElo "2465"]
[BlackElo "2351"]