<U.S. Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), John Cornyn (R-Texas), and Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) introduced the Secure School Buses Act to prevent school bus manufacturers with ties to foreign adversaries, including the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), from accessing federal funding.

“Currently, federal funding for public transit is restricted from going to companies linked to adversaries like the CCP, but this restriction does not extend to school buses,” said Senator Blackburn. “Our Secure School Buses Act closes this dangerous loophole, protecting national security and our students.”

Senator Kelly emphasized the bill's role in ensuring fair competition for U.S.-based companies. “The Clean School Bus Program has allowed Arizona and other states to upgrade their bus fleets with American-made buses. This bill ensures Chinese government-backed companies can’t unfairly compete in this program, just as we’ve protected public transit systems,” he said.

Senator Cornyn underscored the bill’s national security implications: “It’s unacceptable for hostile nations to benefit from American taxpayer dollars. This legislation ensures federal funds won’t go to subsidiaries or affiliates of predatory entities like those in China.”

Senator Baldwin added, “Taxpayer dollars should support American businesses, workers, and communities—not adversaries like China. I’m proud to work with my colleagues to ensure taxpayer investments in school buses stay in the U.S. and don’t give a competitive edge to bad actors.”

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) launched the Clean School Bus Program several years ago to help school districts transition to electric buses. To date, the EPA has awarded nearly $3 billion in taxpayer funds through this program. However, some companies involved in the electric bus industry have concerning ties to the CCP and other foreign entities.

Currently, local governments can use federal funds to purchase buses from these companies, with some marketing their buses specifically for the Clean School Bus Program. While public transit systems are barred from purchasing vehicles from such foreign-linked companies, there are no restrictions on school bus purchases. This gap leaves schoolchildren vulnerable to potential security risks.

Senator Blackburn has long raised concerns about the national security risks posed by Chinese-made electric vehicles and connected cars, given many Chinese companies' ties to the CCP. This new legislation addresses the same concerns within the school bus industry.>

<When Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) decided to run for Senate, it provided a rare opening in one of the safest congressional districts in the state for Democrats and set up a fiercely competitive and expensive primary.

The July 30 primary results were close and after an automatic recount, the top two contenders were separated by just 39 votes.

Typically, such a narrow outcome would result in a legal battle to ensure all votes were properly cast and counted — but this is Arizona, where former president Donald Trump and Republicans have criticized the voting systems for years, especially in the Phoenix area. Kari Lake, the Republican running against Gallego for Senate, is still legally challenging her defeat in the 2022 governor’s race, which she lost by about 17,000 votes.

The congressional candidates and key Arizona Democratic Party figures were fearful that casting doubt on the result would draw claims from Trump and his allies that Democrats were “election deniers,” according to five Democrats and a Republican closely familiar with the race who spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly discuss private conversations. Questioning the outcome, they said, carried the risk that the former president would cite complaints made by Democrats about the legitimacy of the state’s voting system should he lose the November presidential election and try to undermine the results again.

Plus, neither of the Democratic candidates’ campaigns had evidence of problems big enough to change the outcome of the race, they said, and the odds of winning a court case were slim.

“The conversation was mindful of those conflicts,” said one Democrat familiar with the losing candidate’s strategy who has been involved in Arizona politics for many years. “We were very careful that the narrative was not anything that says, ‘The county runs terrible elections.’ … We were going to do what was best for the election without us being skeptical and putting on a bad look for Democrats.”

The close primary illustrates the challenge facing Democrats around the country — especially in battleground states — who may face the prospect of challenging razor-thin outcomes in November. After defending the nation’s voting systems and describing attacks on it as an existential threat to the American experiment, Democrats could find themselves in the position of raising challenges to it after the general election.

Arizona’s 3rd Congressional District stretches across parts of Phoenix and its suburbs and its residents are mostly Latino and working-class. It has about 313,000 registered voters, the fewest of any of the state’s nine districts. The district had one of the state’s lowest rates of voter turnout in the 2022 election, where Gallego captured 77 percent of the vote.

The race to replace him was blistering and expensive, pitting two progressive front-runners against each other: Yassamin Ansari, a former Phoenix City Council member who years ago advocated for climate change as a policy adviser at the United Nations, and Raquel Terán, a former state lawmaker, one-time chair of the state Democratic Party and community activist. The race offered an up-close view into fissures within the party’s most liberal wing — a stark departure from the type of competitive congressional races that typically take center stage in the state where candidates must appeal to middle-of-the-road voters during general elections.

Both candidates focused heavily on their relationships with constituents within the district and their professional records. Ansari, the 32-year-old daughter of Iranian immigrants, was considered an underdog and emphasized her work on the city council to try to make housing more affordable, to tackle climate change and protect access to abortion. Terán, who was born in an Arizona border town, was largely considered the front-runner and had the backing of influential party figures, like Sen. Mark Kelly (D) and Planned Parenthood’s lobbying arm. Terán, 46, also ran on the need to increase affordable housing while highlighting her support of abortion rights.

With the candidates largely agreeing on policy, they emphasized their historic backgrounds, youth and leadership styles. Their allies, meanwhile, criticized campaign donations by those who had previously given money to Republicans or conservative causes and questioned the opposing candidates’ commitment to the district and liberal causes. As early voting began, Terán called on Ansari to denounce the support of a pro-cryptocurrency super PAC that had ties to Trump-aligned donors and poured about $1.4 million into the race.

The race saw more than $5.6 million in ad spending, according to data from AdImpact — an unprecedented level in this district. As early voting began and the campaigns knocked on doors to turn out voters in the searing heat, no one knew how it would end....>

<.... It didn’t end on Election Day. For six days, the candidates and their teams gathered around computers to frantically check updates from Maricopa County, which administered the election. They contacted voters who had issues with their ballots to fix them with the county so they could be tallied. Finally, after more than 44,000 ballots were tallied, 42 votes separated the candidates — making it one of the closest federal races in state history.

Ansari, who held the advantage, did not claim victory; Terán did not concede.

“We are still hard at work ensuring that every vote is counted,” Ansari said.

Terán said: “We know as Democrats, especially here in Arizona, how important it is for every vote to get counted.”

The race headed to an automatic recount under a state law passed after Trump’s 10,457-vote defeat in 2020. Recounts rarely change outcomes, and Ansari and her team wondered whether Terán would challenge the final result in court, said four people familiar with conversations. But it was a risky proposition since there were no substantial problems with the way the election was run. On top of that, Terán’s attorney represented two Democrats who have made trust in elections cornerstones of their own political brands: Vice President Kamala Harris and Kelly, the senator who was fresh off consideration to join Harris’s ticket.

“Having the very team who defended Arizona’s outcome in 2020 raising challenges without evidence in 2024 would have been political insanity,” said Stacy Pearson, a Ansari ally who informally advised the candidate and was involved in some strategy discussions.

During video meetings and phone calls, Terán and her campaign weighed her path forward, two people recalled. Terán did not respond to a request for comment.

“It was the campaign’s approach to leave no stone unturned,” one person said. “There’s always a trust-but-verify thing.” The campaign looked for abnormalities in the election process, examined notes from election observers and scoured news reports and social media for complaints about how the election was administered.

“We looked very closely at everything, we asked a lot of questions,” the person said. “I don’t think Raquel Terán ever wanted to go to court on the basis of a conspiracy theory or an unsubstantiated allegation. In the age that we live in, doing something like that … wouldn’t be helpful.”

Terán’s campaign waited for the results of a recount, which came on Aug. 20 in a Maricopa County courtroom. Attorneys and campaign aides, state and local election directors and reporters gathered inside for a rare exercise. Much like being handed a verdict in a criminal case, a sealed manila envelope was handed to a Maricopa County Superior Court judge.

“You all must be exhausted,” the judge said before opening the envelope and sliding out the paperwork.

“Yassamin Ansari received 19,087 and Raquel Terán received 19,048 votes,” the judge said. “This means the higher vote-getter is Yassamin Ansari.”

Ansari had added no new votes during the re-tally while Terán had picked up three. In the end, just 39 votes separated the candidates — three votes less than the original 42-vote margin. Errors sometimes happen during elections and when election officials checked their work during the recount, they found three differences that favored Terán:

When counting a batch of early ballots, one was not tabulated in the original count because of a machine jam. The ballot was counted during the recount, adding a vote for Terán.

One voter filled in the oval next to Terán’s name and the oval next to the line for a write-in candidate, which is called an overvote. That overvote was removed from the original count. The recount adjudication board determined that the voter intended to vote for Terán.

Another voter marked the oval next to Terán’s name and put some sort of shimmery substance — possibly white out — in another oval. The recount adjudication board awarded the vote to Terán after determining the voter intended to vote for her.

Terán quickly and publicly conceded, and called Ansari to congratulate her.

“The rest of the country should feel assured that Maricopa County and Arizona run a phenomenal election, and they are diligent, they are tireless, they are meticulous,” Ansari said at a victory event inside of a sheet metal workers shop. “Whoever wins in November, I trust that the election will run perfectly.”>

<A Republican-led group is challenging Georgia's new requirement that poll workers count the total number of ballots by hand, saying it's another example of the State Election Board overstepping its legal authority.

Eternal Vigilance Action amended its existing lawsuit on Wednesday to also challenge that rule adopted Friday by the board.

The group, founded and led by former state Rep. Scot Turner, a Republican, was already suing the board over rules that it earlier adopted on certifying votes, a step that finalizes results. One of those rules provides for an undefined “reasonable inquiry” before county election officials certify while another allows county election officials “to examine all election related documentation created during the conduct of elections.”

Turner's lawsuit is scheduled for an Oct. 4 hearing before Fulton County Superior Court Judge Thomas Cox. Eternal Vigilance Action is asking Cox to overturn the rules, or at least put them on hold until after November's presidential election.

The new ballot counting rule and two others having to do with county certification of vote totals were passed by a majority on the board made up of three Republican partisans who have been praised by former President Donald Trump. The rules have raised alarms among Democrats, voting rights groups and others who fear they could be used to cause chaos and undermine confidence in the election results in this crucial swing state if Trump loses to Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris in November.

Turner, however, said in a telephone interview that his lawsuit is motivated by his view of constitutional principles, saying the board is part of the executive branch that is intruding on powers reserved for legislators.

“They are not an elected body," Turner said the State Election Board. "They are not accountable to voters, therefore they should not have lawmaking authority.”

The new ballot counting rule requires that the number of ballots — not the number of votes — be counted at each polling place by three separate poll workers until all three counts are the same. If a scanner has more than 750 ballots inside at the end of voting, the poll manager can decide to begin the count the following day.

Georgia voters make selections on a touchscreen voting machine that prints out a paper ballot that includes a human-readable list of the voter’s choices as well as a QR code that is read by a scanner to tally the votes.

Proponents say the rule is needed to ensure the number of paper ballots matches the totals recorded on scanners, check-in computers and voting machines. The three workers will have to count the ballots in piles of 50, and the poll manager needs to explain and fix, if possible, any discrepancies, as well as document them.

In a memo sent the day before the election board voted on the ballot counting rule, Attorney General Chris Carr’s office said the rule is “not tethered to any statute” and is “likely the precise kind of impermissible legislation that agencies cannot do.” The memo from the Republican Carr's office warned that any rule that goes beyond the board’s authority is unlikely to survive a legal challenge.

Turner said he viewed his lawsuit as putting Carr's arguments before a judge. His amended lawsuit also adds challenges to rules that the board adopted to require daily public updates of the number of votes cast during early voting, to potentially allow more partisan poll watchers to observe the tabulation of votes.

Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and an association of county election officials had also cautioned the board against passing the rule. They said it could delay election night reporting of vote totals and could weaken protections on the chain of custody of ballots.

Results wouldn't be delayed if poll workers send the memory cards that record the votes in machines to the central tabulation location before finishing the hand tally.

Another lawsuit from state and national Democratic groups is also challenging the two certification rules. A judge has set a Tuesday bench trial in the Democrats’ lawsuit.

The State Election Board has been besieged by critics in recent months as it considers new rules, many of them proposed by Trump allies that opponents say could erode public confidence in the election results.

“They are providing bonfire material for conspiracy theorists to attack the legitimacy of elections based on the complaints of a very noisy minority of Republican voters," Turner said.>

<Tesla CEO Elon Musk is a prolific spreader and amplifier of misinformation on his social media platform X, formerly Twitter, a new report alleges.

An analysis from NewsGuard shows that Musk has advanced at least 17 false narratives from the group’s misinformation database, from sharing a video promoting the narrative that Haitians eat pets to accusing Democrats of "importing voters." The billionaire also frequently amplifies some of the platform’s worst offenders in terms of spreading false claims: of the five accounts he interacts with most frequently, four are "misinformation superspreaders" who have grown their followings as a result.

One account, @EndWokeness, which spread racist lies about Haitian immigrants, experienced a 30% follower count bump in the six months in which Musk repeatedly boosted it. Another, @libsoftiktok, whose anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric inspired bomb threats at a children's hospital and who falsely claimed that schools had provided litter boxes to children who identify as cats, saw a 14.8% growth in their following. On Tuesday, Musk engaged with a report from @EndWokeness criticizing George Soros’ company's acquisition of a radio station group, writing “Crazy” in a quote-tweet that’s been viewed 29 million times.

Two other accounts that experienced massive boosts from Musk either amplified or outright invented conspiracy theories suggesting that Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign adopted a Nazi slogan; that Ukraine sold weapons to Hamas; and that Venezuelan immigrants had overtaken an apartment complex.

The amplifications come amid concerns that Musk, who has taken an increasingly extreme tone, has an enormously wide-reaching platform.

Musk, who has raised concerns with recent posts that appeared to encourage violence against Harris and President Joe Biden, boasts nearly 200 million followers on X, a 19% increase since January of this year.

In comparison, NewsGuard’s analysis found that some of the largest mainstream accounts on the platform, including legacy media outlets, saw stagnant growth or follower declines.

The analysis follows past findings from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which in August published a report identifying 50 instances of Musk posting false election claims in 2024, accruing nearly 1.2 billion views. Musk lost a July 2023 lawsuit against the center in which he accused it of conspiring to drive advertisers off his X platform.

Musk, who initially purchased Twitter with the purported intention of increasing transparency and freedom of speech on the platform, oversaw a rise in hateful content and lies on the platform while making moderation tweaks to crack down on some speech, banning words like “cisgender” from X.

Musk has also reportedly used the X platform to stop the spread of information he finds disagreeable, censoring recent reporting on Trump campaign documents hacked by the Iranian government, suspending pro-Harris organizations on the platform and flagging unflattering reports about the Trump campaign as spam in recent weeks.>

F*** Tesla. Hope that worthless sumbitch goes broke.

<In order to dispel the notion that he is a replicant with no concept of human emotion, vice-presidential nominee JD Vance has chosen to hang around with some of the more odious mucksavages of the religious right. Chief among them is this guy Lance Wallnau, and Vance will be dropping by Wallnau’s “Courage” Tour in Pennsylvania on Saturday. Wallnau is what they call an “evangelical influencer,” and at some point we are going to have to have a discussion about using “influencer” as if it were an actual job or something.

Whatever. Wallnau is a superstar in the world of crackpot Christianity. He is credited as the creator of the Seven Mountain Mandate and is a leader in the New Apostolic Reformation, both of them hardcore Christian dominionist outfits. Wallnau popularized the completely batshit notion that Donald Trump is the modern King Cyrus, the king who freed the Hebrews from their Babylonian captivity despite not being Jewish himself. Thus, Wallnau argues, the former president* is an imperfect, sinful vehicle through whom God’s great purpose of “re-Christianizing” America will be fulfilled. (Other Cyruses cited by Wallnau include Viktor Orbán and Jair Bolsonaro.) The whole Cyrus scam is an easy way for the faithful to adhere to the MAGA gospel while hand-waving away the fact that their chosen Cyrus is a crook and a predator. That’s also how Wallnau comes to his apologia for the January 6 rioters.

From CBS News:
In the tent in Eau Claire, Wallnau justified the riots that took place at the U.S. Capitol nearly four years ago. “Jan. 6 was not an insurrection,” he said. “It was an election fraud intervention.”

Theologically, of course, Wallnau is a balls-out heretic. And politically, if JD Vance is really trying to defuse the whole weirdness label that the Democrats have hung on the GOP ticket, dancing in this carnival of fools is really not the way to do it.>

Dance with the devil, he stuffs the pitchfork up your ass.

<Four years ago, some of then-President Donald Trump's supporters were so certain he won that they sued or breached the U.S. Capitol to stop the certification of the election.

Courts, audits and other reviews have disproved Trump's claims of a stolen election in 2020, when President Joe Biden won the presidency. But in the heat of another election year, Trump has primed his supporters to reject the results of a tight race. While campaigning as the 2024 Republican presidential nominee, Trump has repeatedly told them to turn out in droves and make the election "too big to rig."

He told supporters during a campaign visit in western Michigan on Friday, "They cheat, that's the only way we're going to lose." And later in the Detroit suburb of Warren, in a pre-recorded video played before he took the stage, Trump said, "Keep your eyes open, because these people want to cheat and they do cheat and frankly, it's the only thing they do well."

While Trump has yet to commit to accepting the outcome of the presidential election, several of his supporters who attended rallies in Michigan on Friday said they're ready to do so even if he loses.

Jordan Walton, 24, of Warren, is a restaurant worker and Trump supporter who was too young to vote in 2016. In his first opportunity to participate in a presidential election, Walton backed the former president's reelection bid in 2020. But unlike some Trump voters, he accepted Trump's loss as legitimate that year.

"It sucks. But yeah, he lost," Walton said before heading into the town hall event in Warren.

He said he expects a close election this time and would accept another Trump loss. "Ain't going to be happy, but you know, it is what it is," he said.

Walton plans to vote in person, but said Trump’s past railing against absentee voting hurt the Republican presidential candidate’s chances four years ago. "Well, I think he kind of screwed himself to be honest, because he wasn't promoting among his voters vote-by-mail," Walton said.

Trump has shifted on the issue with his campaign now encouraging his supporters to vote absentee or early in-person.

Thomas Van Overloop, a 19-year-old currently studying at Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids, Mich., said he wanted to make sure his first vote in a presidential election is cast at the polls, likening it to a rite of passage.

While Trump disputed, and continues to dispute, his 2020 electoral loss in Michigan, Van Overloop said he doesn't plan on contending any election results, should Harris win the state.

"I wasn’t a big fan of (Jan. 6) and the stolen election thing," he said. "I think we've got to look to the future instead of looking back."

Van Overloop, part of the youth vote bloc both campaigns have courted, said many of his peers are similarly enthusiastic about voting this fall.

"Most people I know are pretty excited to vote for the first time, pretty excited to be involved in politics and the election."

Standing across from a table urging Trump voters to request an absentee ballot, David Ortez, 28, of Northville, said he plans to vote in-person on Election Day because he likes "the vibes." He said he likes going vote together with other people in his life, saying it feels like more of an "event" than absentee voting.

Ortez said he would accept another Trump loss and doesn't think the election was stolen four years ago. He said he's had conversations with other Trump supporters who disagree, but he said when that happens, he nods his head and tries to avoid an argument.

No matter who wins in what he expects will be a close presidential race, he said he hopes voters will accept the outcome and doesn’t want to see a repeat of Jan. 6. “No crazy s***. We don’t need that. We have too much nonsense in the world right now, and we don’t need more violence. That’s the last thing we need,” said Ortez, who works at a hospital.

While some Trump voters say they’re certain Trump's 2020 loss was illegitimate, Lauren Marougy, 38, of Commerce Township, Mich., hasn't made up her mind on the matter. "I don't know, like I really don't know. I think he won," she said after a long pause. Marougy said it'd be sad if Trump really did win the 2020 election but didn't end up in the White House. "I wouldn’t really want to believe that," she said.

Marougy said she would accept a Trump loss in November. "I accepted it last time," she said. "I mean, what can I do? I'm not going to like lose my mind over it." She said she wouldn't protest his loss, "Because it wouldn’t get me anywhere."....>

<....Josie Kornev said she has to vote ahead of Election Day, as she's an election worker in Kent County in Michigan. Kornev, who ran for the Kent County Board of Commissioners earlier this year but lost in the Republican primary, said she will likely vote in early voting.

Although she was working at a poll in Grand Rapids in 2020, Kornev referenced absentee ballot counting on election night in Detroit that year, when Trump-aligned election challengers protested vote counting. Although claims about vote counting at the then-TCF Center being illegitimate ran rampant in the weeks after the 2020 election, those claims ended up being debunked.

Kornev said she doesn't plan on disputing the election results this year in the event of a Trump defeat.

"I'm not going to riot or anything," she said. "I love my country. I believe in voting and the freedom to vote. I would think people would be sorely regretful if they voted for Kamala Harris and policies that she wants to implement."

Shawn Clapper, a 54-year-old contractor from Lincoln Park, Mich., said he voted absentee in 2020 and plans to do so again. "It's easier," he said.

Clapper said he doesn’t believe Trump lost in 2020. "I think it was stolen. Most definitely. 100%," he said.

He pointed to the 2020 election to explain why he doesn't really think a Trump loss this time would be fair and square, saying he generally distrusts elections. But don't expect him to protest the outcome if Trump loses. "I'll let everybody else do that," he said.

Ron Piskor, 75, of Warren is a retired engineer who plans to vote in person on Election Day. "I just trust it more so than any of the other systems that they got right now," he said.

He wouldn't say whether he would accept a Trump loss as legitimate. He's in a wait-and-see mode. It depends on what Trump – and other officials – have to say about how the election was run, Piskor said.

He said he suspects the 2020 election was stolen. But there's one thing that might make him believe that this upcoming election will be conducted fairly: "Just the fact that there’s no poll workers reporting any suspicious activity or anything like that."

Piskor didn't publicly demonstrate against Trump’s loss and 2020 and doesn't plan to do so again if his candidate is defeated. "It’s useless," he said.

Matt Swift, who works for a Grand Rapids-area manufacturer building steel structures, said he plans on going to the polls to cast his ballot Nov. 5.

"I don't trust the absentee, I don't know why," Swift said. "Maybe it's just in my head. I would rather be there with everybody knowing my vote counts."

Despite his stated distrust, Swift said he would have no issues with the outcome of the election should Trump not win. He said his support for the former president is largely based on his experience at work during the Trump presidency – he said his company had more projects available to bid on and the bidding margins were wider.

He's feeling confident about Trump's chances, though.

"I really do," Swift said. "I know it's going to be close. But I just feel like what I'm seeing, what I'm talking (about), what I'm hearing, I like the odds."

In 2020, Biden defeated Trump in Michigan by more than 154,000 votes, or close to three percentage points. In 2016, Trump beat Hillary Clinton by about 10,700 votes in Michigan. It was the closest margin of any state that year.>

<The Department of Justice sued the State of Alabama and its top election official on Friday for allegedly removing voters from its election rolls too close to the November election.

Last month, Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen announced that he had begun inactivating the voter registrations of 3,251 people who had been previously issued noncitizen identification numbers.

The National Voter Registration Act prohibits states from removing voters from rolls within 90 days of a federal election, and Alabama's voter roll maintenance commenced 84 days ahead of the November election, the Justice Department alleged.

"The right to vote is one of the most sacred rights in our democracy," Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division said in a statement. "As Election Day approaches, it is critical that Alabama redress voter confusion resulting from its list maintenance mailings sent in violation of federal law.

A Justice Department review of the purge also identified multiple native-born and naturalized citizens who were incorrectly identified as potential noncitizens during the voter purge. A coalition of voting rights groups separately sued Allen earlier this month over the move, alleging he illegally targeted and intimidated naturalized citizens.

The Justice Department seeks injunctive relief that "would restore the ability of impacted eligible voters to vote unimpeded on Election Day," the department said in a statement.

It also seeks mailings to educate eligible voters concerning the restoration of their rights and "adequate training of local officials and poll workers to address confusion and distrust among eligible voters accused of being noncitizens."

Alabama Secretary of State Allen declined to comment on the DOJ lawsuit but said in a statement, "I was elected Secretary of State by the people of Alabama, and it is my Constitutional duty to ensure that only American citizens vote in our elections.">

<While Northerners might be more familiar with sandwiches like BLTs or a Reuben, if you head down to New Orleans, you'll stumble across something called a po'boy. This hearty sandwich consists of French bread packed with tomatoes, lettuce, and either seafood or meat (or you can even make a vegetarian tofu po'boy). Then, it's slathered with mayo, ketchup, or other sauces to really bring on the flavor.

If you want to make the ultimate po'boy, however, you may find that all those fillings tend to fall out when you go to bite into it. To help you avoid making a mess, Daily Meal spoke with Chef Michelle Wallace, founder of b'tween sandwich co, to get some exclusive insights into how to prevent this from happening. She explained, "In the case of a shrimp po'boy, I like to start at the bottom and work my way up." Of course, while she's referring to a classic shrimp po'boy, this same rule can apply no matter what protein you fill your sandwich with.

Use The Sauce As A Glue

The first step when putting together your po'boy, Chef Michelle Wallace explains, is to slather your bread in sauce. If you want to really bring out the French fusion flavor, you can use a remoulade sauce, which has a mayonnaise base but comes packed with a much tangier flavor thanks to the capers, pickles, and lemon juice in it. It can work particularly well on seafood po'boys, helping to balance out the sweeter flesh of the shrimp, oysters, or other meat.

To add the remoulade (or other sauce) to your sandwich, Wallace says, "On the bottom [piece of] untoasted bread, spread the sauce then add the fried shrimp. The sauce helps the shrimp make its footprint in the bread. It's more likely to stay in place." It serves as a sort of glue, holding your protein in place. You can also lightly press your shrimp into the sauce and bread, helping prevent it from shifting when you squeeze the sandwich together.

Another trick is to slather sauce on both sides of your bread. This can help hold ingredients in from the other side when you put your sandwich together, too.

Finish Up By Piling On The Veggies

With your protein and sauce on the bread, Wallace explains that it's time to add the rest of your filling ingredients. "On top of the shrimp goes the lettuce, then the tomato, then the (optional) pickles and onions and topped with the sauced top bread. It's perfection!" By adding your veggies second, you can help press the protein further into the bread when you press the sandwich together. This helps avoid everything falling out when you bite in, which can happen if you finish by adding the protein at the end.

At the same time, this method means that you don't have to worry about how many veggies you add. While lettuce and tomato are staples, you can also add Wallace's suggested pickles and onions. Or you can upgrade your shrimp po' boy with additional ingredients. For instance, a sweet pineapple slaw can not only add unique tasting notes to your sandwich but can also serve as an extra glue to help hold the other veggies inside. Or, perhaps you'll finish it up by piling in gooey, melted cheese to lock the ingredients in place. Either way, by following Chef Wallace's suggested order, you can easily keep your sandwich from falling apart.>

<A new profile of mega-billionaire Mark Zuckerberg in last week’s New York Timesidentifies America’s richest millennial (he owns 1/50th of all millennial wealth in the US) as a Libertarian:

“Privately, Mr. Zuckerberg now considers his personal politics to be more like libertarianism or ‘classical liberalism,’ according to people who have spoken to him recently. That includes a hostility to regulation that restricts business, an embrace of free markets and globalism and an openness to social-justice reforms — but only if it stops short of what he considers far-left progressivism.”

Zuck, of course, isn’t the only one. It’s high fashion across Silicon Valley and the GOP to claim your Libertarian credentials; Ron (and now Rand) Paul turned it into a moneymaking scam, and most all of the Putin Caucus in the GOP love to talk up libertarianism, as do multiple rightwing tech billionaires. Senator Mike Lee proclaims himself a Libertarian, and has for years.

We see it writ large in the rhetoric of Republican members of Congress and conservative pundits who argue that shutting the government down is a good thing, because most government functions are “unnecessary” or “woke.”

Libertarians believe the only legitimate functions of government are running the army, the police, and a court system to adjudicate crimes. Forget about everything else, from protecting consumers and the environment to the social safety net.

They even argue that public roads, instead of being free, should have tolls on them and be owned by billionaires or corporations who can extract even more money from us. That fire departments should be run by private corporations for profit.

So let’s take a look at how libertarianism would work out in America, and where it came from in the first place.

Generally speaking, Libertarians don’t believe in democracy, which, they say, is “mob rule” and should be replaced by “the magic of the marketplace” — or at least the “magic” of people made rich by the marketplace — running the country’s essential services.

Here’s the one question that always stops libertarians dead in their tracks when they come on or call into my radio/TV program to proclaim the wonders of their political ideology:

“Please name one country, anywhere in the world, any time in the last 7000 years, where libertarianism has succeeded and produced general peace and prosperity?”

There literally is none. Nowhere. Not a single one. It has never happened. Ever.

If it had, that country would be on the tip of every Libertarian’s tongue, the way Democratic Socialists talk about Norway or Denmark where the full-on Social Democracy and regulated capitalism experiment has succeeded for generations.

Doing my show from Copenhagen a few years ago, I had one of that nation’s top conservative politicians on.

“So, you’re one of the nation’s leading conservatives,” I said. “I guess that means you want to privatize Denmark’s national healthcare system?”

He blinked a few times, incredulous, and then said, bluntly, “Are you crazy?”

There are, of course, examples of governments that intentionally or unintentionally operate broadly along libertarian lines. Back in the 1980s when I was setting up international relief projects with the Salem organization based out of West Germany, I worked in several such countries.

They were places where the government’s only real function is to run the army, police, and the courts, just like libertarians say America should be run. No social safety net, no Social Security, no national healthcare, no or few state-funded public schools, no publicly funded infrastructure of any consequence.

In 2008, my friend and colleague the late talkshow host Joe Madison (“The Black Eagle” on SiriusXM) and I saw how this worked in South Sudan on the border of Darfur as the northern Sudanese government was burning people out of their homes and the group we were with was flooded by tens of thousands of refugees.

It was similar to what I saw in 1980 in Uganda when I was working there at the end of the Tanzanian war to expel Idi Amin. There were literally no government services other than the police and the army.

In parts of Colombia later that decade, after a bomb went off just a block from where we were working, I heard stories of middle-class men in the next neighborhood over who’d an organized an urban “hunt club,” complete with logos and patches, using high-powered rifles to pursue what they described as “feral children.”

Kidnapping was also a major industry in Colombia then: a friend in Bogota was kidnapped and repeatedly raped while her husband, forced to listen to her screams on the phone, frantically tried to raise enough money to pay her ransom. I later met with them both and heard the story firsthand....>

<...In those countries that, because of corruption, civil war, or oligarchic ideology are run along Ayn Rand/Mark Zuckerberg libertarian lines, the roads, utilities and housing are fine in wealthy neighborhoods that can provide for themselves, but the rest of the country is potholed and dark, while everyday people often have to walk miles to get firewood, food, and fresh water every day.

There are few or no taxes for the very rich in such countries, and no resources at all for the very poor except those provided by international relief agencies like the one I worked with.

We generally referred to those countries as “failed states.” Rand Paul would probably describe them as “Libertarian paradises,” as his father advocated when, during a presidential primary debate, he said people shouldn’t be let into hospital emergency rooms unless they can pay.

“That’s what freedom is all about, taking your own risks,” Ron Paul said.

No country has ever succeeded when its government has suffered the fate that multimillionaire K Street Lobbyist Grover Norquist wished on America when he famously told NPR:

“I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”

That’s what Texas did when they split their grid away from the rest of America to avoid regulation of their power industry. The lie of libertarian policies was on vivid display when Texans died from hypothermia while Ted Cruz fled to Cancun.

And then Texas families who survived the bitter coldgot $3,000 to $17,000 power bills after the freeze left, because of magical deregulated “free markets” for power in that state.

The libertarian streak in GOP politics was on vivid display when the power went down and the now-resigned Republican Mayor of Colorado City, Texas, Tim Boyd, posted to Facebook:

“No one owes you are (sic) your family anything; nor is it the local government’s responsibility to support you during trying times like this! Sink or swim it’s your choice! The City and County, along with power providers or any other service owes you NOTHING! I’m sick and tired of people looking for a damn handout!

“If you don’t have electricity you step up and come up with a game plan to keep your family warm and safe. If you have no water you deal with out and think outside of the box to survive and supply water to your family.

“If you are sitting at home in the cold because you have no power and are sitting there waiting for someone to come rescue you because your (sic) lazy is direct result of your raising! Only the strong will survive and the weak will parish (sic).”

This libertarian world-view has been foundational to and at the core of the Republican mantras of austerity and “self reliance” ever since the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s.

It’s what Trump tried to do to our public health agencies when he first came into office and shut down Obama’s pandemic response operations in both the National Security Council and the Department of Homeland Security. As a result, more than a million Americans died of Covid and millions more are disabled for life.

When George W. Bush put a Republican-donor horse show judge in charge of FEMA’s disaster response, his libertarian attitude pretty much guaranteed thousands of people would die in Hurricane Katrina: “Heckuva job, Brownie.”

The Bush administration also defunded food safety enforcement and the predictable result was an increase in food-borne sickness and death.

At the behest of fossil-fuel billionaire libertarians, Republicans have fought any regulation of the fossil fuel industry for 50 years; the result is climate wilding that’s devastating our country from California to Texas to the Midwest to Miami Beach.

Mitch McConnell and Republicans in the US House and Senate argue that giving a $2 trillion tax cut to billionaires was an appropriate thing for government to do (even though it jacked up the national debt), but Build Back Better to help out average Americans is, they say, a crime against our republic.

Americans, increasingly, are figuring out the damage this failed 40-year-long libertarian experiment has done to our nation, which is why people are leaving the Republican Party in droves.

Libertarianism is often simply a waystation on the road to authoritarianism. And many Americans are realizing it.

There is, however, one group that is still quite enamored of libertarianism: rightwing billionaires and the corporations that made them rich. And quite a few of them have spent the past decades shoveling cash into the Republican Party, with no sign of a letup to this day....>

<....They set up think tanks and fund hundreds of college professors nationwide to preach their libertarian ideology, and often dominate internet searches because of their thousands of organizations and “news” sites.

They create phony grassroots organizations and get deluded middle-class white people to show up with signs like, “Keep Your Damn Government Hands Off My Medicare!”

They set up organizations nationwide and in every state to bring Republican legislators together with lobbyists to craft libertarian “corporate friendly“ legislation that consistently enriches the top 1% and screws average Americans.

They proclaim the wonders of “small government” and “fiscal responsibility,” code words for gutting the protective functions traditionally performed by government and replacing them with “charity” and corporate sponsorships.

And Republican politicians live in fear today of doing anything that might cause government to actually help the American people, because those same libertarian billionaires and corporations who fund their campaigns are more than happy to destroy them politically when they stray.

Despite all the obvious disasters and widespread public opposition, they’re still intent on America being their grand experiment to prove that at least one country can operate along libertarian lines.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s when Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand were first pitching this ideology (then called neoliberalism and objectivism) as a way to bring “freedom” to America, they were broadly ridiculed and ignored.

But the libertarian foundations and billionaires got into the act in the 1970s, along with the rightwing media organizations they were then building, putting Ronald Reagan into office and shaping his policies, sending America into a libertarian slide.

Forty-three years of the Reagan Revolution’s libertarian experiment have brought us the predictable result:

— historically low tax rates on corporations and billionaires— an impoverished middle-class

— devastated labor unions— the highest rate of child poverty and maternal death in the developed world

— millions without access to healthcare— one in seven American children going to bed hungry— our schools, roads, bridges and rail systems in shambles, and — the nation $34 trillion in debt.

Libertarianism is a poison that’s crept into our society on the backs of rightwing billionaires like the late Libertarian David Koch, who ran for Vice President in 1980 on a platform of shutting down every government agency except the military, courts, and police.

But where did all this “greed is good” as a political philosophy that Zuckerberg is now embracing start?

Believe it or not, it began in the 1950s with a corrupt real estate lobby, a brutal child murderer, and the young, idealistic Russian immigrant who fell in love with him.>

<Two old partners in tyrannical sadism working the system, one for the other as a falsifying witness, pretending in the biggest way to be honest. Every regular reader knows 1000x better. These troublemakers live to habitually harass other members non-stop, day-after-week-after-month-after-year-after- decade ... on and on and on it goes. The games of chess don't matter to them. It's unimaginable that an unabashed liar retains editorial privileges and yet slanders members with mischaracterizations on a daily basis and CGs fails to remove such fabricated attacks nor the attacker.

For some, it would seem odd that zanzibar returned after a short "hiatus", started making demands, but has never bothered to pay for a membership.

It's just one big never-ending con game with these two. Remember when zanzibar pretended not to be Z free legend 000000010 and whatever other sockie put to use that month??? Z claimed to have invented the Railroad checkmate that is hundreds of years old. Z even recruited enemies to join in harassing BP!! All that non-sense is not forgotten.

Next week or next month, Z will want to switch to something else and ask for something else that other paying members don't get. The manipulation, harassment, dishonesty, and ordering others about just never stops.

Let's not forget the glutinous trash posting. Z whips out four posts in this forum on the 29th. That's just a warmup for what we're in for.

The pause, the silence was most refreshing.>

So it was; now hibernate for good and all, <fredremf>, supreme jackal that you are.

<With less than 40 days left until November's election, former President Donald Trump continues to escalate his personal attacks against Kamala Harris, calling for the vice president to be "impeached and prosecuted."

Throughout his campaign rally speech in Erie, Pennsylvania, on Sunday, Trump said Harris should be disqualified from running for president, resign from office and be investigated at the highest level.

"She should be disqualified. She should resign the vice presidency and go home to California," Trump told the cheering crowd while discussing the "invasion" at the U.S.-Mexico border.

While criticizing the Biden-Harris administration's immigration policies, Trump baselessly called for the Vice President to be impeached.

"She should be impeached and prosecuted for her actions," he said.

Trump has a long history of threatening legal action against his political rivals, including President Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton in the run-up to the 2016 election.

Now, as he faces his own set of legal battles, the former president is again calling for investigations into his new opponent, Vice President Harris, over policies he disagrees with, attempting to blame her for the deaths of people killed by undocumented immigrants.

Harris visited the U.S.-Mexico border on Friday, her first trip there in more than three years.

Delivering a speech in Douglas, Arizona, a border town in the critical battleground state, Harris called for tougher security measures and criticized Trump for his role earlier this year in tanking a bipartisan bill that was the result of months of negotiations.

Harris' trip and Trump's continued comments on border security come as immigration continues to be a top issue for many voters ahead of the election.

A recent ABC News/Ipsos poll found that 70% viewed immigration at the southern border as an "important" issue for them, and Trump led Harris by 10 points on who voters thought was best suited to handle it.

However, as his Republican allies push for Trump to focus on the issues rather than attacking Harris, Trump’s rhetoric in recent days has become more extreme.

Trump's personal attacks on Harris Sunday echoed similar remarks from his rally on Saturday, where he called the vice president "mentally disabled."

"Crooked Joe became mentally impaired. Sad. But lying Kamala Harris, honestly, I believe she was born that way. There's something wrong with Kamala, and I just don't know what it is, but there is definitely something missing," Trump said.

Majority Whip Tom Emmer, who is helping Sen. JD Vance with debate the vice presidential debate preparations, didn’t go as far as to rebuke Trump’s comments when pressed by ABC News’s Martha Raddatz; however, he did ultimately concede, "I think we should stick to the issues.>

<JD Vance spoke at a festival of election denialism in a Pittsburgh suburb Saturday, lending the imprimatur of his position as the Republican nominee for vice president to a gathering of people who still falsely believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen from former President Donald Trump and who might be laying the groundwork to make the same bogus claim next month if Trump and Vance lose in Pennsylvania, a crucial battleground state.

Vance participated in an hour-long town hall at one of the final stops of the “Courage” tour, a neo-Charismatic Christian revival roadshow organized by Lance Wallnau, a Texas-based evangelical pastor and self-described “apostle” who claims to be able to speak with God, who told him Trump is prophesied to be the 47th president of the U.S. If Wallnau’s name sounds familiar, it might be because he played a major role in fomenting disinformation about the last presidential election and was even set to speak at the Jan. 6, 2021, election denial rally in Washington that became the violent insurrection.

As Vance spoke from the stage at Wallnau’s event Saturday to a few hundred mostly middle-aged and octogenarian white people, a familiar cast of election-denying organizations operated booths on the other side of the convention hall, encouraging people to join their mailing list or offering them candy. Their presence here demonstrated the ways Wallnau’s brand of extreme Christian nationalism dovetails with election denial. After all, of what import are actually fair elections here on Earth if a candidate is predestined or prophesied from above to take office?

Manning one of the booths was Toni Shuppe, who said she would only speak to HuffPost on the condition that she got to write and edit this article with the reporter, allowing it to publish with her go-ahead. (HuffPost did not agree to those conditions, which Shuppe said she developed after a wave of negative media coverage over the last few years led her to receive threats.)

That negative media coverage detailed how Shuppe led a petition drive to nullify the results of the 2020 presidential election and how the organization she leads, Audit the Vote PA, shared data it collected with Pennsylvania news outlet LancasterOnline, claiming it showed widespread fraud and irregularities in Pennsylvania vote-counting procedures, only for the outlet to find that the group’s work was “rife with errors and speculation and that its methodology was deeply flawed” with “mistakes that undermine its conclusion and make its findings unreliable.”

Those news stories also noted that Shuppe once falsely claimed that voting machines in Pennsylvania had been hacked by China; that she had pushed unhinged QAnon and Pizzagate conspiracy theories; that she once posted on Gab, the social media platform popular on the far right, that “every state needs to secede from the Federal government”; and that she once pushed the false, racist and Islamophobic claim that former President Barack Obama was a “Muslim” who was “born in Kenya.”

Still, Shuppe was welcomed this weekend at the “Courage” tour stop in Monroeville, standing among a bevy of other MAGA organizations devoted to “election integrity.” This included Turning Points USA, the far-right youth group founded over a decade ago now by 30-year-old Charlie Kirk, which has turned into a fundraising juggernaut in the MAGA universe and put a ton of money in Kirk’s pockets too, allowing him to buy a $5 million mansion in an Arizona country club, even as he’s grown increasingly racist and antisemitic on his eponymous podcast, one of the most listened to in America.

Kirk used his massive platform in 2020 to become one of the biggest propagandists for the false claim that mail-in voting across the country was awash in fraud. And on Jan. 6, 2021, Kirk organized buses to take Trump supporters to the rally in Washington, writing on X, formerly called Twitter, that the event “would likely be one of the largest and most consequential in American history.” (Kirk deleted the post after Trump supporters at the rally stormed the Capitol.)

Earlier this year, the attorney general in Arizona indicted two Turning Points USA officials, Chief Operating Officer Tyler Bowyer and state Sen. Jake Hoffman (a contractor for the group), for being among the 11 “fake electors” in the state — part of a nationwide effort by the Trump campaign to send “alternate” electors to Congress who would declare Trump the winner in states he’d lost, handing him another term.

In the 2024 election, Turning Points USA has invested over $100 million to get out the vote, support far-right candidates with a history of election denial, and, as noted by The Guardian, likely oust “some key Arizona election officials who disputed claims of election fraud in 2020.”....>

<....The organization sent its offshoot, Turning Points USA Faith, on the “Courage” tour. Its booth Saturday included free candy for attendees and buckets of pins with slogans like “PRAY FOR THOSE WHO PERSECUTE YOU,” “COMMUNISM IS SATAN’S RELIGION,” “EVEN HEAVEN HAS SECURE BORDERS. REVELATION 21:19,” and “DISCIPLESHIP STARTS AT HOME,” which featured an illustration of a 1950s white family reading a Bible in their living room.

A booth over was the America First Policy Institute, a MAGA think tank whose lawyers are currently representing a Republican Georgia election official — with a long history of election denialism — in her lawsuit that’s asking for the discretion to refuse to certify election results.

AFPI has also filed one of the eight lawsuits this year coming from Trumpland, which baselessly alleges that next month’s election could be skewed by widespread voting by undocumented immigrants. The chair of AFPI’s Center for Election Integrity, former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, posted on social media last month that the Biden campaign was plotting “to weaponize federal agencies into a leftwing election operation that opens the doors to non-citizen voting.”

There is no basis for this claim, just as there’s no basis for the claim that undocumented immigrants vote anywhere near the levels to sway the election. (A study of the 2016 election, during which Trump had also warned of noncitizens voting, found that out of 23.5 million ballots cast, there were only 30 incidents of undocumented people voting.) A recent investigation by Documented, an investigative watchdog and journalism project, detailed how conspiracy theories “about noncitizens casting ballots in U.S. elections have become a centerpiece of MAGA messaging in advance of the 2024 election.”

“Yet it is a manufactured threat, pushed and platformed by a well-funded network of far-right groups, as part of an intentional and highly coordinated effort to misinform the public, advance longstanding right-wing policy goals, and cast doubt on the election results in November,” Documented wrote.

And finally among the booths at the “Courage” tour stop was Joshua Standifer, founder of a group called Lion of Judah, which is devoted to signing up Christian Trump supporters (and by default election skeptics) as poll workers across the country before next month’s election. The group’s website describes this mission as a “Trojan horse” strategy to get Christians in “key positions of influence in government like Election Workers, which will help them spot incidents of fraud, and taking “the first step on the path to victory this Fall,” according to The Guardian.

Just after Vance’s appearance on stage at Saturday’s “Courage” tour, Standifer recounted the story of how he decided to start Lion of Judah.

“I heard the Lord tell me something just absolutely crazy, and he said, ‘Start a group called Lion of Judah and bring the Holy Spirit to the place you were told to stay out of — the political square,’” Standifer said.>

<One of the most absurd lies promulgated by MAGA Republicans is the idea that Donald Trump does not regularly endorse violence. They did it during his time in office, they did it after January 6, and they did it, most recently, following two attempts on his life—while claiming it was actually Democratic rhetoric that led to two men allegedly trying to assassinate him. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth, and the latest example tearing their claims to shreds would be Trump’s call over the weekend for the police to violently assault Americans en masse in order to stop crime.

Speaking at a rally in Pennsylvania, the ex-president said the key to preventing crimes like shoplifting is state-sanctioned police beatings, which he lamented the “left” does not allow. “You see these guys walking out with air conditioners, with refrigerators on their back. The craziest thing,” Trump said. “And the police aren’t allowed to do their job. They’re told, if you do anything, you’re gonna lose your pension…. They’re not allowed to do it because the liberal left won’t let ’em do it. The liberal left wants to destroy them, and they want to destroy our country.” Then he unveiled his big idea: “If you had one really violent day…one rough hour, and I mean real rough, the word will get out and it will end immediately.”

During his remarks, Trump also falsely claimed one can steal up to $950 worth of goods with no consequences in California, which appeared to be both a reference to Proposition 47—which downgraded some theft offenses to misdemeanors from felonies—and an attempt to tie the law to then California attorney general Kamala Harris. But as Politico notes, while Harris was in office when the ballot initiative was approved, “she remained neutral on the matter.” Meanwhile, “the dollar threshold Trump referenced actually became law four years earlier, signed by then governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican.”

Following Trump’s remarks in Pennsylvania, a spokesperson for his campaign absurdly claimed he was “clearly just floating [police beatings] in jest,” adding: “President Trump has always been the law and order President and he continues to reiterate the importance of enforcing existing laws. Otherwise, it’s all-out anarchy, which is what Kamala Harris has created in some of these communities across America, especially during her time as attorney general when she emboldened criminals.”

Trump, of course, is the only person currently running for president who is a convicted felon. Meanwhile, the notion that he is all about “law and order” is fully laughable given that (1) he has called for defunding the DOJ and FBI and (2) prosecutors say January 6 was “the largest single-day, mass assault of law enforcement officers in our nation’s history.” As for the idea that he was totally just joking about that “one really violent day,” well, that is not exactly believable given his long history of calling for violence, a rap sheet that includes:

Endorsing assaulting reporters

Telling police officers to knock suspects’ heads against the sides of their squad cars

Musing about “Second Amendment people” preventing the appointment of liberal judges

Telling supporters, of a man who’d been ejected from one of his rallies, “I’d like to punch him in the face”

Telling a crowd at one of his rallies, “If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously, okay. Just knock the hell—I promise you I will pay for the legal fees, I promise”

Whipping his supporters into a violent frenzy with months of lies concerning the 2020 election, which led to a violent attack on the Capitol that left numerous people dead, and which he tried to justify by saying: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”

Defending his supporters’ decision to chant, “hang Mike Pence”

Calling for alleged shoplifters to be “shot” as they leave the store

So yeah, maybe believe him when he says these things.>

<Part of the state law Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton invoked to defend raids on Democrats and activists in the state is unconstitutional, a federal judge has ruled.

The legal provision struck down Saturday by U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez is contained in S.B. 1, a controversial and sprawling Texas Senate omnibus bill first enacted in 2021. Among a variety of the bill’s features, it imposed restrictions and criminal penalties for canvassing methods used commonly by outreach groups and volunteers alike trying to assist voters with the completion or submission of their ballots, including absentee or mail-in ballots.

Paxton did not immediately return a request for comment on Monday.

When Texas enacted S.B. 1, the state deemed that “vote harvesting” methods would be considered a third-degree felony going forward and that convicted violators could face up to 10 years in prison and be forced to pay a fine of up to $10,000.

The notion of “vote harvesting,” however, was ill-defined in the legislation.

Paxton and Republicans in Texas championed the canvassing restrictions as a tool to fight voter fraud. In recent weeks, Texas law enforcement has raided the homes of a Democratic candidate for the Texas state house, a local mayor and Latino voting rights activists.

But Rodriguez said the canvassing language was confusing and overly vague, and that enforcement of the provision could infringe on the First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment rights of people and entities who — long before S.B. 1 was ever enacted — engaged in common practices like hosting in-person candidate forums, giving voting machine demonstrations or providing language assistance to voters on how to complete ballots.

The judge noted, for example, that it was commonplace for bilingual volunteers to knock on doors in Texas and find that the person at home may need help translating something.

Canvassers for groups such as plaintiff OCA-Houston, for example, a network representing Asian American and Pacific Islanders in Texas, may also provide prospective voters with things like Gatorade or water if they are out in the elements.

This, according to Paxton, is an illicit “benefit.”

S.B. 1 as a whole was challenged in court for the first time in September 2021 when voting rights group La Union del Pueblo Entero brought a lawsuit on behalf of numerous voting and civil rights groups, Texas election officials and individual voters.

The group’s lawsuit was consolidated with a series of other similarly situated claims, including those from the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund. A bench trial was held over several weeks and ended in October 2023. The court weighed allegations that S.B. 1 chilled the plaintiff’s rights and imposed hurdles on groups that have already experienced disproportionate discrimination in Texas.

Notably, S.B. 1 banned 24-hour drive-thru voting in Texas, something made popular after the COVID-19 pandemic. S.B. 1 also made it a crime for poll workers to “take any action” that may make a poll watcher’s observation “not reasonably effective,” one of the plaintiff’s attorneys, Leah Tulin, said during closing arguments, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

During the state’s last election, this factor alone, Tulin said, led several county election officials in Texas to report that they “witnessed poll watchers behave in ways that made both election workers and voters feel uncomfortable, harassed, and intimidated.”

Even poll watchers who acted in good faith now feel intimidated by the threat of criminal liability for merely doing their jobs, Tulin argued.

Rodriguez’s order only addresses the canvassing restrictions. The decision means that Paxton is now stopped from conducting probes into alleged “vote harvesting.”

“The County DAs are permanently enjoined from deputizing the Attorney General, appointing him pro tem, or seeking his appointment pro tem from or by a district judge to prosecute alleged violations of TEC § 276.015 that occur within their jurisdictions,” the 78-page order states.

As HuffPost previously reported, an 87-year-old volunteer for the League of United Latin American Citizens said she was questioned for hours by armed police officers gripping riot shields. She wasn’t the only one. Dozens of volunteers were confronted by authorities, and some said they had guns pointed in their faces and their phones seized. Two of the volunteers allegedly targeted by Paxton’s investigators for so-called “vote harvesting” were a 73-year-old and 80-year-old LULAC member. A Texas state director for LULAC said the raids were an “intimidation tactic” used on Texas’s Latino community.

<Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney appeared open to upholding recent changes to Georgia’s State Election Board rules based on arguments made during a bench trial in the Peach State on Tuesday.

The case, filed in Fulton County by the Georgia Democratic Party and the Democratic National Committee, challenges two new rules passed by the Georgia State Board of Elections related to the certification of election results. The Democrats argue the rule changes could lead to confusion and certification delays of the 2024 presidential election results.

The first rule requires county officials to conduct a “reasonable inquiry” before certifying results, though the new rule lacks a clear definition of what constitutes such an inquiry. The second rule permits election officials to examine all election-related documentation before certification, raising concerns that this could cause delays in close or contested races. Both were passed by 3-2 votes, with Republican members of the election board in the majority.

McBurney’s questioning during the hearing signaled a degree of skepticism toward the plaintiffs’ argument that these rules could obstruct the certification process. He first sought clarification from both sides, asking whether they agreed that certification of election results by a Nov. 12 deadline, one week after the Nov. 5 Election Day, is mandatory and must meet statutory deadlines. Both parties affirmed this point.

"What we're debating about is what [superintendents] can do in the period leading up to certification, and whether we call that work ministerial or discretionary," McBurney said.

With the parties expressing no disagreement on the obligation to certify the election, McBurney signaled uncertainty at the outset of the bench trial about what further clarification was needed from the court. He pressed the plaintiffs on why the rules would cause county officials to believe they could not certify results, suggesting that the mandatory nature of certification was already clear.

The Democrats contended that the lack of clarity in the rules could lead to misinterpretation by election officials, creating unnecessary delays and possibly threatening voters’ rights. They urged the court to issue a clear declaration to prevent any such confusion.

The judge seemed to suggest that the second rule, the examination measure that allows superintendents to examine election-related documentation, does not create the same level of uncertainty as the reasonable inquiry rule since it is optional rather than obligatory.

Attorney Baxter Drennon spoke on behalf of the Republican National Committee, which intervened in the case in support of the State Election Board's certification rules.

Drennon called the plaintiffs' concerns "hypothetical," noting, "I have not heard the petitioners cite one aspect of either rule that is inconsistent or different than what's required here under the law."

The key matter is whether McBurney will issue a declaration or a writ of mandamus on the dispute before the November election. He appeared to cast doubt on whether the question in the case can be answered with a direct ruling, as the rules themselves do not seem to conflict with the obligation to certify results. Additionally, no county board member has yet used these rules as a reason to refuse certification, which may limit the court’s ability to intervene at this stage of the dispute.

While McBurney has not ruled on the case, his inquiries suggested he might not see the rules as inherently problematic. His approach indicated a willingness to allow the election board’s rules to stand, given the agreement among all parties that they may not interfere with the statutory requirements for certification.

The State Election Board has gained attention recently as its Republican majority has become more open to demands from activists, largely fueled by lingering anger over the 2020 election results in Georgia, which saw President Joe Biden narrowly defeat former President Donald Trump.

Trump, who raised doubts about Biden's 2020 victory in the state, has praised board members Janice Johnston, Janelle King, and Rick Jeffares for pushing rule changes aimed at promoting “honesty, transparency, and victory.”

Other lawsuits have cropped up against the election board amid the last-minute rule changes. On Monday, a day before the trial, Democrats filed a separate lawsuit targeting a different rule that the state election board passed on Sept. 20 by another 3-2 vote. That rule requires workers at polling places to hand-count paper ballots on election night, in addition to the automated vote tabulation that will take place the night of the election.

<U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) is complaining his Democratic opponent, U.S. Rep. Colin Allred (D-TX) has turned his re-election race into a “battleground,” and “Chuck Schumer and George Soros” are flooding the state with cash, while the Cook Political Report just published more bad news for the Texas Republican.

“Look, there’s no doubt Texas is a battleground today,” Cruz told Newsmax on Tuesday, as he was reminded he won his seat by double digits in 2012. Cruz complained Senate Democratic Majority Leader Chuck Schumer “has been explicit, I’m his number one target in the country, and the Democrats are spending over $100 million. Chuck Schumer and George Soros are flooding cash into the state of Texas.”

“They are coming after me with everything they got. My opponent, who is an extreme left wing Democrat, is a congressman named Colin Allred. He’s voted with Nancy Pelosi 100% of the time his first four years in Congress, he’s voted for open borders and higher taxes and defunding the police, and yet he’s been on TV for three months straight with relentless attack ads.”

Cruz’s Democratic opponent, Rep. Allred, is a former NFL linebacker who won his congressional seat by defeating 11-term Republican U.S. Congressman Pete Sessions in 2018.

Cruz went on to urge viewers to “contribute because we are getting swamped by Chuck Schumer and George Soros.”

Tuesday afternoon the venerated Cook Political Report downgraded the far-right Texas Senator’s chances, from likely Republican to lean Republican.

They write, “we view Texas as a slightly more competitive race than Florida,” referring to the re-election campaign for U.S. Senator Rick Scott (R-FL).>

Content a problem, <suboptimal bottom>? That ancestor causing you sleepless nights? Too f***ing bad, apostle of evil.

<SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on Monday termed the denial of about $900 million in subsidies to its satellite internet segment Starlink as “contemptible political lawfare” on the heels of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) turning to Starlink to provide connectivity in regions devastated by Hurricane Helene.

FEMA is currently using multiple Starlink satellite systems to help with responder communication and more are being shipped to assist with restoring communication infrastructure, the agency said on Monday.

Musk on Monday also said that SpaceX has sent “as many Starlink terminals as possible” to areas in need since the Hurricane and is continuing to do so.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) said last month that Starlink is not eligible to receive $885.5 million in subsidies.

In 2022, the FCC concluded that it would not offer subsidies to Starlink from its Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, alleging that the SpaceX subsidiary failed to demonstrate that it had the technical and financial ability to deploy internet with certain speeds at 642,925 locations in 35 states.

Virginia E-rate consultant Greg Weisiger subsequently filed a petition for reconsideration of the order earlier this year. However, the Wireline Competition Bureau said in September that the petition does not provide any new information or evidence of changed circumstances which disputes the agency's prior decision.

Musk in September slammed the FCC as “flat-out lying.”

"How exactly does SpaceX not have the technical or financial ability to do something that it is already doing?" Musk then wrote on X.

Musk slammed the FCC in December too, alleging that the decision to deny Starlink the subsidies is "extremely unethical and politically partisan.">

Speaking of 'contemptible'.....how's tricks, <bungholio pontificator>?

<Mark Robinson, North Carolina’s lieutenant governor and Republican gubernatorial candidate, skipped a vote on declaring a state of emergency in advance of Hurricane Helene’s arrival to the southern state, according to a report.

Robinson, who has been under attack recently over alleged racist and explicit posts on a pornography website’s message board, was the only council of state member who did not vote on Democratic governor Roy Cooper’s emergency declaration, WRAL News reported.

Cooper sought the declaration from top North Carolina electeds in the state’s executive branch on 24 September so he could mobilize a robust response to Helene. The vote enabled Cooper to more easily mobilize rescue vehicles and issue evacuation orders.

Eight of the nine council of state members voted for the declaration, according to WRAL – everyone except for Robinson. Cooper has since sent more than 700 members of North Carolina’s national guard to areas reeling from the wrath of Helene, which has left at least 166 dead and hundreds missing in six states; Joe Biden also green-lighted the governor’s request for expedited federal help.

Guard members have rescued more than 400 people and numerous animals in western North Carolina in the wake of historic flooding and landslides that washed out roads, dramatically complicating search efforts. More than 347,000 remain without electricity in North Carolina.

Some of the hardest-hit areas, including Asheville, are struggling to find clean water. Some residents are boiling water and bathing in creeks, according to The Washington Post.

Robinson has hammered on Cooper’s response to Helene even though he didn’t vote on the emergency measure, saying on social media Tuesday: “The time for politics is over. We are talking about saving people’s lives here.”

“North Carolina must follow the lead of successful governors like [Florida Republican governor Ron DeSantis]. Cut the red tape. Stop waiting on federal resources and allow private industry in to assist with rescue and recovery efforts, and repair infrastructure immediately.”

“This is a life and death situation,” he said.

WRAL said it remained unclear why Robinson did not respond to the vote. Robinson’s office did not comment directly to WRAL on why he opted out. His chief of staff, Krishana Polite, said that he was visiting areas impacted by Helene.

“All hands on deck means just that, including the hands of every single elected official in this state,” she said in a statement obtained by WRAL. “We need to be boots on the ground, working to rescue the citizens of this state – just as Lieutenant Governor Robinson and his team have been doing 24/7 for days now.”

Robinson is running against Democrat Josh Stein, the state’s attorney general. Numerous Republicans have distanced themselves from Robinson in the wake of the controversy over alleged message board posts, which he has denied writing.>

<Greetings Elite Posters,

This is another installment of <Tomorrow's News Today>!

Patriots, real Americans, have nothing in common with the godless, homosexual, communist, immoral, parasitic, iconoclastic, lawless, murderous, treasonous, criminal libs that are ruining the country.

There is no compromise.

There is no negotiation.

There is absolutely no common ground.

The libs are like tooth decay for America.

The libs do not have a viable alternative vision for America that we just need to find a compromise on.

There is a fundamental difference just as there is a fundamental difference between good and evil, right and wrong.

It takes one bullet, just one.

"The shot heard 'round the world", remember?

As soon as the regular folks decide enough is enough, there will be shots fired at these mobs, these brown shirts, these thugs.

When that happens, it's going to spread like wildfire. Patriots will be fighting for their country, fighting for freedom, fighting for America and will defeat the godless, commie scum that's stinking the place up. It's going to happen.

The CHOP in Seattle brought lawlessness to a big city. That's what it is going to take. When emergency people can't get into the CHOP zone and people die, that means there's no law. The governor and mayor are guilty of dereliction of duty. When there is no law, the people will take the law into their own hands.

If it keeps up, I predict that there will be lib massacres in the streets. The <Noks> and <Zanzibars> of America will be found and killed.

It happens in every country at one time or another, and it looks like it could happen here.

The tree of liberty is watered with the blood of tyrants from time to time.

<Tomorrow's news today>>

Recognise yourself, <remf>?

<We just got the most extensive new detail in years about former president Donald Trump’s plot to overturn the 2020 election, in the form of a much-anticipated filing from special counsel Jack Smith.

The 165-page partially redacted filing, which was unsealed by U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, lays out the evidence Smith’s team would like to present in the long-delayed Jan. 6 federal criminal case against Trump. What evidence Smith can use and what charges can stand are disputed after the Supreme Court recently gave presidents including Trump extensive immunity from criminal prosecution.

But the filing also doubles as a sort of blueprint for the case ahead. It features some significant revelations and quotes that could be important not just for the legal battle, but for the 2024 election.

Below are some takeaways from the filing.

1. ‘Make them riot’: A prescient comment two months before Jan. 6 A big part of the case against Trump is making clear that he and those around him knew their plan was corrupt — that it wasn’t just them really believing the election was stolen.

One detail in particular stands out.

The filing cites a scene from Nov. 4, 2020, at the TCF Center in Detroit. It says a colleague of a Trump campaign official and an alleged co-conspirator informed them that a batch of votes that heavily favored Joe Biden was apparently correct.

The alleged co-conspirator, whose description matches that of Trump’s Election Day operations chief Mike Roman, allegedly responded by saying: “find a reason it isnt” and “give me options to file litigation.” Then in a mangled message, the co-conspirator seems to suggest that they are not concerned if the claims are frivolous — “even if itbis.”

Trump ‘resorted to crimes’ after losing 2020 election

The colleague suggested such things could lead to a repeat of the so-called Brooks Brothers riot, a fraught scene in South Florida during the contested 2000 presidential election.

The Trump campaign official and co-conspirator allegedly responded: “Make them riot” and “Do it!!!”

It’s an eerily prescient comment, given that just two months later, Trump’s false and often nonsensical claims of voter fraud would lead to a large-scale riot at the U.S. Capitol. (It’s worth noting that whether the Brooks Brothers riot was actually particularly violent is disputed.)

It could certainly help prosecutors drive home the point that the people behind the effort to contest the 2020 election didn’t actually care about the evidence and whether they were right; they just wanted to sow doubt.

2. ‘So what?’: Trump’s seeming lack of concern

The filing fills out some key details of what happened after the Capitol riot touched off on Jan. 6, 2021. It repeatedly reinforces the idea that Trump was well aware of what was taking place even as he — for hours — resisted reining in his supporters and even launched an attack on Vice President Mike Pence at 2:24 p.m.

The timeline here was filled out somewhat by the House Jan. 6 select committee, but the filing contains even more detail.

It says that around 1:30 p.m., Trump settled into the dining room next to the Oval Office and “spent the afternoon there reviewing Twitter on his phone,” while Fox News played on TV. It suggests that prosecutors have forensic evidence from the activity logs on Trump’s phone to back up that he was “consistently” using his Twitter application.

A footnote says that, before Trump’s tweet attacking Pence, advisers told him that “there’s a riot, and there are people inside the Capitol Building,” and “someone’s gotten into the Capitol.”

The filing goes on to say that Trump was alone when he tweeted at 2:24 p.m. that Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.” (Rioters at one point chanted for Pence’s hanging, and Pence had been evacuated at 2:13 p.m.)

All of those are crucial to establishing that Trump had reason to believe Pence could be in danger and that he knew things had gotten out of hand, and that he pressed forward with attacking Pence anyway. It also builds on extensive evidence suggesting Trump declined for hours to do something about the violence. He didn’t tell people to go home until 4:17 p.m.

But perhaps the most vivid new detail comes from shortly after Trump’s Pence tweet. It says an aide relayed a phone call to Trump stating that Pence had been taken to a secure location. The aide hoped Trump would do something to help, according to the filing.

Instead, Trump allegedly responded, “So what?”

It’s hardly the first evidence that Trump might have been indifferent to Pence’s fate and might have even seen utility in the unrest when it came to his efforts to overturn the election. But it might be among the most striking pieces of evidence on that front....>