<[Event "94th US Open"]
[Site "Philadelphia PA"]
[Date "1993.08.07"]
[EventDate "1993"]
[Round "1"]
[Result "1/2-1/2"]
[White "Alexopoulos, Georgios"]
[Black "Goodlett, Willis"]
[ECO "B22"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

<....z @#$% here, z @#$% there, @#$%, @#$% everywhere. When doez it ever stop??? z openly judging others and telling people who actually pay a membership what they can and cannot do while z tramples the guidelines. It's all garbage that CGs should have completely stopped dead in its tracks.

Meanwhile FTBs account continues to get raped repeatedly. There is no hesitation to delete, suspend, and slash FTBs interests and wisdom. There have been more than a thousand attacks on FTB collections in a year's time. Oh yes, we're monitoring the attacks....>

<fredthebore>, do the world a favour and sod off. Stat. You have no right to dictate that others should purchase premium memberships.

<Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) faced intense scrutiny from his fellow lawmakers during his Senate confirmation hearing this week over his past behavior — including an accusation from Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) that he has “anger issues.” But he also had a moment with Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) last month that revealed quite a lot about him, according to one American studies professor.

On Wednesday, Paul confronted Mullin, President Donald Trump’s pick to take over the Department of Homeland Security, for previously calling him a “freaking snake” and for appearing to justify a violent 2017 attack on Paul. Paul shared details about the attack and the injuries he sustained, which he said included six broken ribs and a “damaged lung.”

Paul went on to point out another altercation involving Mullin, a former MMA fighter. He challenged a committee witness, Teamsters union boss Sean O’Brien, to a physical fight during a Senate hearing in 2023, telling CNN days later that he had no regrets about what happened.

Paul asked Mullin on Wednesday to “explain to the American public why they should trust a man with anger issues to set the proper example for ICE and Border Patrol agents.” Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) also told CNN after the Senate hearing that Mullin’s behavior toward O’Brien during the 2023 Senate hearing was “unacceptable” and that one of his biggest objections to Mullin leading DHS is his “temperament.”

But Mullin was also widely criticized for an incident with Green not too long ago that seems particularly poignant at this moment.

During Trump’s State of the Union address last month, Green had held up a sign in silent protest that read: “Black people aren’t apes!” before he was escorted out of the House chamber by the sergeant-at-arms. It was a reference to a video Trump shared on his Truth Social platform that featured a racist depiction of former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama as apes.

Mullin was among several Republicans who were seen on camera trying to physically snatch Green’s sign away from his hands that night. When Green stood and raised his sign as the president was being welcomed to the podium, Mullin could be seen walking several feet toward Green before he reached over and tried to snatch the sign out of the Democrat’s hand. Green dodged him.

At the time, the Oklahoma senator was widely criticized on X, with many questioning why Mullin was so “angry” over Green’s sign in the first place.

Kari J. Winter, a professor of American studies at the University at Buffalo whose expertise includes gender, feminism, race and class, said that Mullin’s behavior during the State of the Union address last month revealed a lot about him.

“The aggressive manner in which Mullin strides across the Senate chamber to attempt to wrest Al Green’s sign out of his hands is indicative of an explosive temper,” she told HuffPost.

Winter then referenced a video Mullin shared on social media the following day, in which he expressed his frustration with Democrats for their behavior and lack of “decorum” during Trump’s address. He also said he “cannot stand” Green.

“He later tries to justify his behavior by stating ‘there is a certain level of decorum expected during the State of the Union’— an almost laughable protestation in view of his inclination to brawl on the Senate floor,” she said about Mullin’s post. “Instead of condemning racism or distancing himself from Trump’s depictions of the Obamas as apes, Mullin raged: ‘I cannot stand the man called Al Green.’”

Winter had previously told HuffPost after Trump’s address that the sign-snatching incidents showed that Republicans don’t support free speech on issues they don’t agree with.

“Since 2016, the Republican mantra has been ‘free speech for me, not for thee,’” she said at the time. “In other words, they are vehemently opposed to freedom of speech.”....>

<....Tabitha Bonilla, an associate professor of political science and human development and social policy at Northwestern University, also previously weighed in on the sign-snatching moments last month and said that it’s “always inappropriate to respond with physical force to verbal messages.”

“The behavior is not new, and to me, it represents the efforts by this Republican Congress and Party leadership to win and retain power by suppression,” she said at the time.

Speaking about Wednesday’s Senate confirmation hearing, and Paul’s concerns about Mullin’s behavior, Winter told HuffPost on Thursday that “like President Trump and Kristi Noem, [Mullin] swaggers and revels in violent spectacles.”

“Time and again, he lashes out in rage,” Winter said. “The core problem we as a nation face is that he embodies the blend of machismo and obsequiousness that Trump prizes. Like Noem, he is likely to be Trump’s ‘puppet to implement lawless policies,’ in the words of Sen. Richard Blumenthal.”

“We should all sit for a minute with the ramifications of Mullin calling Paul a ‘freaking snake’ who deserved to be viciously attacked just because Paul did not vote with Trump 100% of the time,” Winter later continued. “If Mullin believes that even a fellow Republican senator deserves to be vilified and subjected to violence due to a difference of opinions, what hope can any of us have that he will respect our humanity and our legal rights?”

“If he is confirmed, who will keep our homeland safe and secure from the threats he and his president pose?” she added.>

<he United States has launched a war in Iran. Soaring gas prices are pounding an economy that many Americans already considered unaffordable. And the federal department responsible for protecting the homeland ran out of money more than a month ago.

Naturally, the Senate is debating none of those things.

Instead, Republicans in Congress’s upper chamber are spending this week trying—likely in vain—to pass a bill aimed at addressing President Trump’s yearslong obsession with his 2020 defeat. The proposal, known as the SAVE America Act, would require people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote and photo identification when casting their ballot.

The legislation is ostensibly designed to toughen enforcement of a core tenet of American democracy that most election experts say is already rigorously enforced: the law that only U.S. citizens are eligible to vote in federal elections. But those same experts, along with Trump himself, view the SAVE America Act as much more far-reaching. If it’s passed, voting-rights experts contend, more than 20 million eligible voters could lose ready access to the polls, including many married women who have changed their name and young people who have moved out of state to attend college. (Some Republicans and election experts say that these claims are greatly overstated.) In the president’s estimation, the bill’s passage could seal a Republican win in this year’s elections. “It will guarantee the midterms” in favor of Republicans, Trump told the House GOP conference earlier this month.

The president’s problem is that even the SAVE America Act’s GOP supporters believe that it stands little chance of becoming law. For that to happen, at least nine Democrats would have to join Republicans to defeat a filibuster—a scenario about as likely as Democrats agreeing to carve Trump’s face into Mount Rushmore. A slightly more realistic path would be for Republicans to end the filibuster altogether, which Trump has been urging them to do since his first swing through the White House. Although nearly all of the Senate’s 53 Republicans support the SAVE America Act, far fewer of them are willing to blow up the institution’s most controversial quirk to get it passed.

None of these challenges has stopped Trump or his most fervent allies from demanding that Senate Republicans take up the SAVE America Act and try their best to pass it anyway. The president has threatened to not sign any legislation—even a resumption of funding for the Department of Homeland Security—until Congress puts the elections bill on his desk. The proposal’s leading champion, Senator Mike Lee of Utah, has posted on X about little else for months, and he warned that GOP senators who don’t try to outlast Democratic attempts to filibuster the legislation should lose their seat. (Senate Majority Leader John Thune pointedly brushed back this threat.)

The most pressing question about the SAVE America Act is not whether it’s going to pass, but why Trump and his allies are so determined to see the Senate put up a bill that’s doomed to fail. The White House told us in a statement that the legislation is “commonsense” and pointed to polling showing high support for voter identification. “This has always been a top priority for President Trump,” the spokesperson Abigail Jackson said. “Our elections should be treated with the utmost security.”

Voting-rights advocates have a theory. “It’s a pretext for the next authoritarian escalation,” Alexandra Chandler, who oversees the elections team at the advocacy group Protect Democracy, told us. Chandler and others we interviewed see the Senate’s high-profile debate as one episode in a broad, sustained, coordinated effort by the White House to seed doubt in American elections ahead of what Republicans believe could be steep losses this November. This, she said, would follow a pattern that Trump set both before and after his 2020 loss: before the election, manufacture a crisis upon which he can then blame defeat. “When his allies lose elections, it’s a talking point,” Chandler said: “You didn’t pass the legislation that would have solved this fake problem, and therefore the election results are not valid.”....>

<....Trump has said plainly that he wants to “nationalize” elections that by constitutional design are run by the states. A year ago, he issued an executive order— portions of which a federal court blocked from being implemented—that directed the federal Election Assistance Commission to enforce a proof-of-citizenship requirement for voter registration and sought to compel states to hand over voter rolls to DHS. The FBI has seized materials from the 2020 election in Georgia, federal investigations into that contest are under way in Arizona, and state election officials are alarmed by requests to coordinate their activities with federal agencies whose staff now include election deniers.

Given the bill’s dim prospects, we asked Chandler how seriously her group is taking the legislation. “We’re taking it seriously for what it is,” she replied, “which is not necessarily just an effort to pass a bill.”

If and when the SAVE America Act is defeated, voting-rights advocates don’t expect that Trump will be deterred. Rather, they predict that he will escalate attempts to interfere with the midterm elections. But their fears would become far more acute were the bill to somehow pass. Its requirement for people to prove citizenship in person when registering to vote would cut off the mail- and online-registration options now available in many states. (Trump has pushed the Senate to go even further to limit mail and early voting, both of which are popular options with voters of all political affiliations.)

More than 21 million people lack “ready access” to the documents that the bill would require Americans to provide—a passport, a birth certificate, a military ID, or a driver’s license compliant with the Real ID program, according to Michael Waldman of NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice. New Hampshire passed a similar law in 2024, and voting groups cited reports that hundreds of people were turned away at the polls during municipal elections last year due to lack of proper documentation.

Celina Stewart, the CEO of the League of Women Voters, said the bill would disproportionately affect the approximately eight in 10 married women who change their name. “We just haven’t seen anything on the scale where nearly 70 million women, in one fell swoop, could be challenged and have real barriers to being able to access the ballot,” she said.

Both Trump and the bill’s Democratic critics have characterized the proposal as an overt attempt to swing future elections in the GOP’s favor. But the actual impact the SAVE America Act would have on voting is hard to predict. In a shift from the Obama era, Republican candidates now rely more on their ability to register and turn out less frequent voters, and they have made gains among young and nonwhite voters, who election experts say would face the biggest hurdles if the bill were enacted. And Trump narrowly carried married women in his victory over Kamala Harris in 2024, exit polls showed.

Democrats and some nonpartisan voting advocates have in recent years grown more open to the idea of a national voter-ID law; they considered a proposal from then-Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia when they desperately needed his support for a broader package to expand voting access. “Democrats support commonsense voter-ID proposals,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters on Tuesday. “But the SAVE Act is not a voter-ID bill. It’s a voter-suppression bill.”....>

<....With primaries already under way for this fall’s elections, the effort to implement the changes, should the bill pass, could result in chaos, election experts told us. Many election offices—especially those in rural America—lack the staff, funding, and technology to carry out such a significant mandate, they said. (In Washington State, the bill could cost at least $35 million to implement this year, according to estimates from Senator Maria Cantwell’s office. The National Association of Counties pegs the nationwide cost to administer changes at $510 million each election cycle.)

Election workers already face enormous strain, and many jurisdictions are struggling to retain and recruit enough people to staff the polls. The SAVE America Act would only exacerbate those challenges, advocates told us, because it could expose election workers who erroneously register people without proper citizenship records to criminal penalties. Under the bill, states would have to give voter lists to DHS to run against citizenship data. Already, dozens of states have refused to provide full voter lists to the federal government as part of its efforts to collect the information. (At least 12 states have either complied or said that they will, according to the Brennan Center. The Justice Department has sued more than two dozen states for the information, and three federal courts have ruled this year that the federal government has no right to the data.)

Some Republican secretaries of state view the debate as an unserious attempt to create policy, election experts who have spoken with them told us. (Several GOP secretaries of state we contacted didn’t want to talk about the legislation; one spokesperson described it to us as a “hypothetical” proposal unworthy of his boss’s time.) Should the bill pass, they figure, the courts will block it—at minimum because of a legal theory that courts should not allow rules to be changed so close to an election, because it could lead to confusion among voters and poll workers. They also argue that state and local election officials already routinely kick ineligible people off of voter rolls and that some states are taking on more restrictive proof-of-citizenship requirements on their own. Proof-of-citizenship bills have been signed by the South Dakota governor and passed by legislatures in Utah and Florida.

Derek Monson, the executive director of the Sutherland Institute, a Utah-based conservative think tank, said the centralization of election authority and processes, as well as of citizenship information and voter data, in the hands of the federal government could make voter fraud easier to commit. “What we’ve done is simplified the act of voter fraud for people who want to commit it,” he said. He laid out a scenario in which a clearinghouse of voting data maintained by fewer people at the federal level (as opposed to more people across all 50 states) is accessed by bad actors. “It seems like every other week some federal agency is being hacked,” he added. “Now you’ve just gift-wrapped everyone’s personal voter data for a hacker to get.”

The SAVE America Act’s biggest supporters wave off these concerns. To the many Trump fans who have come to share his unfounded grievances about the 2020 elections, the Senate’s debate represents a moment of validation—win or lose. It “is a sea change from 2020,” Cleta Mitchell, a longtime conservative lawyer who helped Trump try to overturn his defeat that year, told us. As for the bill’s long-shot chances, she said: “You can’t win if you don’t try.”>

<The guardrails that protected the U.S. economy from President Donald Trump’s policy jolts are wearing thin.

New economic reports show inflation is ticking higher, prompting the Federal Reserve on Wednesday to keep interest rates steady. Hiring has stagnated, wage growth has fallen, and market-based interest rates are climbing amid concern over rising prices, sending mortgage rates up. And with oil now topping $100 a barrel — with no end in sight for the Iran conflict — Trump’s economy only has a thin cushion to rely on if the war in the Middle East starts to rock the economy.

The U.S. is now confronting “inherent fragilities,” said Gregory Daco, EY-Parthenon’s chief economist. The “typical buffers that would prevent any type of external shock — like an oil price shock — from disproportionately affecting the economy are smaller than usual.”

“Downside risks are rising, and this is an extremely fluid situation,” he said.

The data shows that the warning lights were flickering even before Iran shut the Strait of Hormuz, choking global supply chains. Trump — already facing the potential loss of Congress to the Democrats — has struggled to sell voters on how his agenda has benefited them, and that will become a lot harder with rising oil and gas prices poised to limit household spending.

“The thing that underlines every strong economy is consistency and progress, and things that promote confidence, and I just don’t see any of those attributes being displayed on a disciplined, routine basis by the White House,” said Chuck Coughlin, a veteran Republican strategist in Arizona who leads the public affairs firm HighGround. “Most of the country is looking at the president, going: ‘What is he doing?’”

Trump this week said oil prices will go down “very, very rapidly” once the conflict ends, but that the security threat posed by Iran is more important than the outlook for oil prices. On Tuesday, White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said he expects the war will only minimally disrupt the economy if it is extended, but that it would “hurt consumers, and we’d have to think about if that continued, what we would have to do about that.”

“But that’s really the last of our concerns right now,” Hassett told CNBC “We’re confident this thing is going ahead of schedule.”

Trump’s approval rating on the economy has been firmly underwater for months. The latest Economist/YouTube poll found that Americans disapprove of the president’s handling of prices and inflation by a staggering 32-point margin, and a majority hold negative views on the Iran conflict.

Beyond the public’s perceptions, the administration’s outlook on the fighting isn’t resonating with Wall Street either. A survey of global fund managers released by Bank of America on Tuesday found that inflation expectations are rising, and 28 percent of those polled now expect Democrats to retake both houses in the midterm elections — up from 20 percent a month ago. Few anticipate the U.S. will enter a recession, but the prospects are looking dimmer than at the start of the year.

“Until this war happened, everyone thought we were going to have a pretty good growth year,” said Bob Elliott, the co-founder, CEO and CIO of the investment firm Unlimited Funds. “Now it’s pretty clear that growth is going to be soft.”

White House officials contend the economy remains on solid footing. The president’s deregulatory agenda and tax cuts are a tailwind for the expansion. The jobless rate is low by historic standards, private sector payrolls grew over the last year — even with the contraction reported by the Labor Department last month — and wages are still climbing faster than prices. Consumer confidence was improving, as were closely watched surveys that track economic activity in the service and manufacturing sectors.

“President Trump has always been clear about temporary disruptions as a result of Operation Epic Fury, but America’s economic fundamentals and trajectory remain resilient: Real wages are growing, CPI inflation has cooled, productivity growth remains robust, and trillions in investments continue to pour into American manufacturing,” White House spokesperson Kush Desai said in a statement. The president is “taking a whole-of-government approach with our allies to shore up any short-term economic impacts,” he added.....>

<....The U.S. is in a much better position to weather the economic fallout than many Asian or European economies. The U.S. is a net exporter of energy, and even if higher oil and gas prices hamper household spending, the effects on the overall economy will be offset by the expansion of domestic production, said Michael Strain, the director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

Oil prices are “a much smaller part of the budgets of businesses and households, a much smaller part of the economy of the whole” compared to previous energy shocks, Strain said. “I think we’re pretty insulated.”

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on Wednesday noted that the economy has weathered several challenges over the last four years and avoided a slump, but he said the rate of inflation remains above the central bank’s target. Price increases linked to Trump’s sweeping tariffs are still filtering through the economy, he said, adding that “the oil shock will still [put] some downward pressure on spending and employment and upward pressure on inflation.”

And “nobody knows” what will happen next, the Fed chair said. “The economic effects could be bigger, they could be smaller, they could be much smaller or much bigger. We just don’t know. People are writing down something that seems to make sense to them, but have no conviction.”

The economic threats become more severe the longer the Hormuz Strait remains closed. The release of global oil reserves, sanctions relief and new political risk insurance for tankers in the region can’t fully offset the scale of the disruption to global supply chains that affect prices and the GDP.

Goldman Sachs dialed up the odds of a U.S. recession in the next year to 25 percent. Other bank analysts are warning the risks to both inflation and growth look more acute now than they did earlier this year, before oil prices started soaring.

The Commerce Department downshifted its GDP estimate for the fourth quarter to reflect a deceleration in consumer spending and exports. Wholesale prices surged in February, the Labor Department reported on Tuesday, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago’s advance estimate of inflation-adjusted retail sales growth for February was negative.

Even setting aside the effects of the Iran conflict, “things look a little bit weaker” than before, Andrew Hollenhorst, the chief U.S. economist at Citi, said before the Fed meeting. Once an oil shock is added to the equation, “it’s a really unpleasant combination of data and events.”>

<Loose-passive tables can be goldmines if you know how to exploit their biggest weaknesses. In this article, we’ll break down five proven strategies that will help you consistently extract maximum value from the most profitable games in poker.

Raise To Two Times The Pot

Many times, I’ll be playing a passive cash game, and I’ll see one of my friends raise to the size of the pot.

“No!” I want to yell at them. “Raise to two times the size of the pot! They’ll still call you!”

If you’re reading this article, it’s likely you’re more serious about poker than you realize. Most players don’t do any kind of study. You likely play better hands than your opponents. You should raise and get value from them because they’re not going to fold to you!

Your weakest opponents will call anything just to see the flop. Your opponents with a clue will fold. That means you’ll be playing HUGE pots versus the worst players at the table with generally superior hands. If you can get in position as well, this is an INSANE edge!

Do you want to put together a huge stack quickly when you sit down? This is how you do it.

Do Not Three-Bet These Hands

Oftentimes, I’ll be sitting at a loose-passive table with my friends. One of the local regulars will raise for the first time in a while. My friend will dutifully three-bet A-Q offsuit from the cutoff and end up losing a large pot.

On the way home I have to ask them, “What the hell were you thinking?”

They will inevitably say something like, “I had A-Q offsuit in position. What’s the problem?”

But let’s think about this for a moment… If your opponent is the type to limp in with everything, won’t that also include A-J and A-10? If that’s the case, what are they raising with? 10-10+ and A-K+ right?

Oops. Why would you want to three-bet into that range? They’re limping their mediocre and good hands. You have to expect they can only have the premiums left when they finally do raise.

The good news is you can cold call more versus these players because they get married to one pair post-flop. Hands like pocket pairs, suited connectors, suited-gappers, suited aces, and suited Broadways go up in value versus them because they’re so likely to make a top pair or overpair that they can’t get away from.

Who Is Predictable Post-Flop And Who Isn’t?

It’s important when you first sit down at these tables that you pay attention. Some of these players will limp in with anything and then look annoyed once you raise. This is someone who expects to be coddled at every poker table. Their home games back home always featured a lot of limping and flops. They think you’re an @#$%*@! for not playing poker their way.

They’ll still call you preflop, don’t get me wrong. But they won’t have a plan for post-flop. They’re not used to pots this large in their home games.

If they flop a set or two pair with draws out there, they’ll often get excited and jump the gun with a big raise. If they just call your continuation bet and look annoyed, they will have a mediocre pair or draw that they want to see more cards with.

Deny them the privilege. Blast them. They’ll hate you and end up folding.

If your table is loaded with players like this, you need to be raising with any hand that has a semblance of value. You’ll be getting so many bluffs through it doesn’t even matter.

However, if the players at your table love to call down randomly or raise for the hell of it, you can’t raise anything you want. You’ll have to raise value hands and play them well. You’ll have to be willing to call down when a line makes zero sense.

Now, that doesn’t mean you play 8-8+ and A-Q+ necessarily. If everyone is limping J-5 suited then K-J offsuit becomes a value hand to isolate with. But you still need something that beats their hand when no one wants to fold....>

<....Who Is Getting Sick Of You?

If you execute the strategies I’ve described above, you are going to make enemies.

Most people want to play a friendly card game. They’ve worked eight hours that day and they want to relax. They want to see some flops, drink some beers, watch some sports, and hang out.

Then your stupid ass shows up and starts raising huge on every other deal. They get indignant. ‘Who does this idiot think he is? Does he think he can bully me?!’

You’ll get folds for a while, but the rubber band will snap at some point. You’ll start seeing hints. They’ll fold with more disgust. They’ll start talking s***. They’ll begin making comments about your raise sizes.

Good. That shows you got in their head. They wouldn’t be complaining about you if they didn’t feel threatened.

If they keep going at you just say a flat, “I guess I play bad.”

If they won’t stop, keep repeating, “I guess I play bad.”

It holds a mirror up to them, and they don’t like it.

Tighten your ranges once you live rent free in their head. You’ll love the results.

Who Always Calls When A Draw Misses?

This is a very important detail…

There are many people that cannot fold on the river when they see a missed draw on the board. The thought that you might be bluffing with a missed draw eats them alive. They can’t live with it. They will always call.

If you learn you have one of these players at your table, you need to bluff them less and go for more thin value bets.

Conclusion

Loose-passive players give you every opportunity to win big pots, you just need the discipline to play them correctly. By applying these five strategies with patience and precision, you’ll turn chaotic tables into steady, reliable profit.>

<On Monday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case that could have a major impact for the votes of millions of Americans — at least, assuming their votes are allowed to be counted.

The case, Watson v. Republican National Committee, challenges whether state officials can count electoral ballots postmarked by Election Day and received less than a week after an election is held.

The case seeks to overturn a 2020 Mississippi state law that allowed absentee voters to mail in their ballots with a postmark as late as Election Day and allowed them to be counted if they were received within five days after Election Day. Notably, the state law was passed with bipartisan support and was signed into law by Mississippi’s Republican Gov. Tate Reeves.

But the Mississippi Republican and Libertarian Parties sued, claiming that counting votes that arrive after Election Day violates federal law. Congress, they contend, designated only a “singular day” for elections and the time allocated for counting, they say, is included in that day. In the petition to the Supreme Court, RNC political director James Blair further claims the extra time allotted to count ballots harms them by draining the RNC’s coffers if they are possibly forced to “spend more money on ballot-chase programs and poll-watching activities” instead of “traditional get-out-the-vote operations.”

Mississippi in turn, counters it has the constitutional right to govern its own elections and that “nothing in history shows that the federal election-day statutes block States from allowing post-election-day ballot receipt.”

Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson emphasized in the state’s filing to the court that the push to invalidate the state’s rights to dictate how its voters can vote would “invalidate laws in most States, will spark nationwide litigation, and will risk chaos in the next federal elections” — an assertion, he pointed out, that neither political party disagreed with. He added that changing the regulation would present “profound practical ramifications” for election administrators who would have to receive and count all votes in a single day.

Access to the ballot box, whether by mail or in person, used to be a bipartisan issue, Lindsay Langholz, vice president of policy and programs at the American Constitution Society, told HuffPost in an interview on March 17.

But the debate now over mail-in deadlines shows just “how quickly this issue and voting rights in general have changed to become a very partisan issue,” she said.

In 2024, a district judge ruled against the RNC and upheld Mississippi’s five-day grace period, pointing out that other states had similar policies and the counting period didn’t impact the electoral process. In its appeal to the Fifth Circuit — considered one of the most conservative court venues in the nation — the RNC fared better. Led by Circuit Judge Andrew Oldham, a Trump appointee, the panel found that constitutional “text, precedent and historical practice” indicated only Election Day “is the day by which ballots must be both cast by voters and received by state officials.”

In dissent, Circuit Judge James Graves, highlighted that at least 28 states and the District of Columbia already have ballot receipt laws that technically preempt the notion of a “single day” for elections.

Graves pointed out that just 20 years ago, even the conservative Fifth Circuit was far more amenable to voters rights and access to the ballot box: In a ruling for a case known as Voting Integrity Project Inc. v. Bomer, the Fifth Circuit said that it “could not conceive that Congress intended the federal election day statutes to have the effect of impeding citizens in exercising their right to vote.”

Langholz attributes some of the shifts to President Donald Trump, who for six years has pushed what has become known as the “Big Lie” about the 2020 election — that it was riddled with fraud, including fraud by absentee voting and that is why he lost.

“I don’t think it’s exclusively because of messaging coming out of White House, but it’s not unrelated either,” she said.

Trump vehemently opposes mail-in voting, though he and many of his GOP allies utilize it to cast their votes. He has repeatedly pushed to end it by baselessly suggesting that mail-in voting leads to “massive voter fraud” and is a “hoax” perpetrated by Democrats who can’t win elections without it.

Many Republicans and especially Trump’s allies in Congress have leaned on this boogeyman to question the reliability of mail-in ballots, “in spite of zero evidence to back up those claims,” Langholz said.

“It also seems to be hurting their own voters as well in a way I don’t quite understand,” she noted....>

<....Mail-in voting is popular among both Democrats and Republicans. The Pew Research Center found in 2025 that 58% of Americans support mail-in voting — a number that was actually a slight drop since the COVID-19 pandemic, when Pew found that 70% of Americans favored mail-in ballots, including almost exactly half of all Republicans surveyed. A recent study by the Brookings Institute found that in the 2024 election alone, the U.S. Postal Service processed nearly 100 million mail-in ballots.

But should the high court rule in favor of the RNC, the reliability of mail ballots could change for millions of absentee voters, including members of the military and their family members who live overseas.

If Mississippi prevails, then the tradition of mail-in voting — which has been around since the Civil War — continues as it has in the past, with states setting their own rules and processes for mail-in voting. (It is worth noting that Mississippi has some of the most restrictive voting rules in the nation already, according to analysis by groups like the Ford Foundation.)

But an RNC victory could potentially kick off a chaotic process where state officials could have just a few short months ahead of midterm elections to make adjustments to mail-in ballot rules.

Dozens of states have grace periods for mail-in ballots because there is a logical understanding that someone who has done “everything right,” to vote on time, Langholz said, should be accounted for.

“Voters who got the ballot in the mail by Election Day, but either because of the Postal Service or because life just happened, or because of weather, voters who did all the right things and cast a ballot within their state rules, should have that ballot counted. We should want pro-voter policies in America,” she said.

There are myriad reasons why people cast a mail-in ballot, and none should be viewed dubiously, Caren Short, the director of legal and research at the League of Women Voters, told HuffPost.

Mail-in voting is a useful tool for people with disabilities, service members, people who can’t get off work or can’t find child care, she notes. It’s great for elderly voters, or voters who simply won’t be present in their district or precinct on Election Day.

“We’re better as a country, as a nation, when more people can vote,” she said.

In a brief supporting Mississippi’s appeal to overturn the Fifth Circuit’s ruling, a group of military-affiliated individuals urged the Supreme Court to keep the grace period, including retired defense officials; former secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force; decorated generals; veterans; a slew of veteran nonprofit support groups; diplomats; and others represented by the Brennan Center for Justice.

“The logic of the Fifth Circuit’s ruling in this case would upend multiple, long-established state laws that specifically use grace periods to alleviate the unique barriers to voting faced by U.S. military and overseas voters,” Brennan Center lawyers wrote.

The League of Women Voters, along with 19 states, have also filed briefs supporting Mississippi’s lawsuit....>

<....But the Supreme Court has already indicated it may have some sympathy with the RNC’s claim that it is injured if ballots are counted after Election Day. The fraud conspiracy perpetrated by Trump has some sway on the court, too.

In 2020, when the Supreme Court prohibited the counting of mail-in ballots received after Election Day in Wisconsin in a 5-3 vote, Justice Brett Kavanaugh argued in a concurring opinion that the counting after Election Day would “flip the results.” That position, however, completely ignores that even if all votes are received on Election Day, not every ballot is physically counted on Election Day.

More recently, in January, the justices ruled 7-2 that longtime Trump ally, Rep. Mike Bost (R-Ill.), who had supported the effort to overturn the 2020 election, had the right to allege injury and challenge how and when a state counts its votes in an election — even though he had won his race.

While the Bost and Watson cases are not a 1:1 comparison, the latitude given by Chief Justice John Roberts in the Bost ruling was considerable. Roberts found proving a “substantial risk of harm” in order to challenge how states govern their elections was unnecessary. Yet, the court was open to allowing challenges to voting procedure nonetheless.

Like Langholz, Short also worries about the potential “logistical nightmare” that will ensue ahead of midterms if the RNC wins this case. She doesn’t envision a world in which the Supreme Court rules in favor of the RNC, but then directs states to wait to implement the new deadline rules.

“I’m not an election official but it seems to me that this would, for many states, effectively eliminate the option of mail-in voting, disenfranchising millions of voters,” she said.

“You can’t say ‘it’s unconstitutional’ and wait until next year. It’s either constitutional or not,” she added.>

<In a series of public statements issued via social media, President Donald J. Trump has leveled a string of personal and political accusations against Texas Representative James Talarico. The comments come in the wake of an election cycle where Talarico, a Democrat, secured a victory over Rep. Jasmine Crockett.

Trump characterized the win as an intentional maneuver by the GOP, suggesting that information regarding Talarico’s personal beliefs and lifestyle was withheld until after the race concluded to highlight what the President described as the candidate’s extreme positions.

The President’s critique focused heavily on Talarico’s personal identity and public health choices, specifically citing Talarico’s views on gender and his continued use of face masks throughout 2023 and 2024.

Trump described Talarico as a “weak, ineffective guy” and claimed his platform included “insults to Jesus” and a mandate for “only vegan food.”

During the address, Trump stated that Talarico is the “worst candidate I have ever seen,” suggesting that any opponent, regardless of their health or experience, would have been able to defeat him under different circumstances.

The rhetoric also pivoted to broader national politics, with Trump taking aim at California Governor Gavin Newsom. The President alleged that Newsom has admitted to “mental incapacity” and “low IQ,” claiming that recent interview performances have effectively removed the Governor from future presidential contention.

Trump further asserted that Newsom’s past comments regarding his audience had led to him being viewed as “a total racist” by African American voters.

Following these critiques of Talarico and Newsom, Trump concluded his remarks by suggesting a shift in the Democratic landscape, stating, “Kamala is back!”

Talarico, a former public school teacher known for his work on the House Public Education Committee, has not yet issued a formal rebuttal to the specific claims regarding his religious views or dietary policies.

Talarico’s Key Comments and Views on Gender

“God is nonbinary”: During a 2021 Texas House floor debate, Talarico stated that “God is nonbinary,” further explaining that “God is both masculine and feminine, and everything in between”. He argued that God transcends human gender categories.

“Six biological sexes”: Talarico has cited biological and genetic studies to argue that there are more than two biological sexes, stating during a legislative hearing that “modern science recognizes there are six biological sexes,” referring to intersex and chromosomal variations (such as XXY).

Support for Transgender Rights: Talarico is a vocal ally of the LGBTQ+ community, opposing restrictions on gender-affirming care and arguing that “trans children are God’s children made in God’s own image”. He has stated that “transgender men and some nonbinary people can still become pregnant, so they may also need reproductive healthcare”.

Biblical Interpretation: He has argued that strict gender binaries are not supported by scripture, citing Paul’s letter to the Galatians that “in Christ, there is neither male nor female”.

Context and Controversy

GOP Criticism: Talarico’s remarks have been heavily criticized by Texas Republicans, who have characterized his views as “radical” and “bizarre,” using them to paint him as out of touch with Texas voters.

Religious Defense: Talarico, who is a Christian and a seminary student, has defended his comments as being rooted in progressive theological traditions rather than “new liberal doctrine”.

“Creepy” Comments Controversy: Talarico faced mockery from critics for a 2023 podcast comment where he stated, “I love… the trans children who showed up yesterday at the state Capitol to advocate for their humanity”.

Talarico has defended his statements, arguing that he is standing up for the humanity of transgender youth and challenging what he considers a misuse of religion for political power.>

<JD Vance will say many embarrassing things during his next two-plus years as vice president, but smart Democratic campaign consultants should keep a recent video close at hand for use in 2028. During a March 16 press availability in the Oval Office, Vance insisted that, unlike the decades of “dumb presidents” before him, Donald Trump is a “smart” one.

The vice president was asked why he was supporting Trump’s war with Iran after having crowed in 2023 that he opposed foreign interventions. (Vance backed the president, he said then, because Trump would avoid “starting world-historic catastrophes in the Middle East” and was a man of “great restraint.”) With his trademark smirk, Vance pointed to the president’s great intellect as the reason why Americans should “trust President Trump to get the job done.”

Yes, Vance was celebrating the intelligence of a same man who suggested injecting bleach into human lungs to kill the Covid-19 virus and who bragged that he “aced” a cognitive test with sample questions like “what is this animal?” while pointing to a picture of a horse.

The “dumb/smart” video is cringeworthy now, especially since Vance is clearly using kindergarten vocabulary so that Trump, who is seated behind the Resolute Desk next to him, will understand the flattery. But it will look much worse in the future, once all doubt that this war is a massive failure has been removed and the vice president is asked if he still has faith in Trump’s towering intellect.

Plenty of political commentators have noted that, by defending Trump’s war with Iran, Vance looks like a grasping phony, which could hurt his presidential ambitions in 2028. But it’s even worse than that for the vice president. Clips like this underscore that he is weak and, frankly, emasculated — eager to debase himself on camera for crumbs of approval from a president whose political and physical strength both seem to be rapidly waning. This is bad news for Vance, who has built his political brand by trying to appeal to the wannabe alpha-male crowd of the “manosphere,” a loose conglomerate of both secular and Christian right content creators whose bro poses and sexist politics helped propel Trump into the White House in 2024.

Even before he was chosen as Trump’s running mate, Vance was betting his political fortunes on a backlash to feminism that exalts caveman sexism and comical macho posturing. His infamous diatribes about “childless cat ladies” were issued mostly on these male-centric podcasts, where talk about guns, mixed martial arts fighting and putting women back in the kitchen is the order of the day.

Since taking office, Vance has continued to complain about how society allegedly encourages young men to “suppress every masculine urge.” He defined these urges as telling jokes and having a beer with friends — two behaviors that approximately no one has actually denounced — but it’s hard to not notice the larger context of right-wing irritation at feminists for shaming men who, like Trump, are credibly accused of rape and sexual abuse. Despite trying to affect a “just-one-of-the-guys” posture — he grew a beard and tries to (be) photographed with manosphere influencers like Jake Paul — Vance inevitably comes across as a hectoring bore, snidely lecturing reporters like they’re stupid children, even as he is typically saying things that are painfully devoid of reason.

A big part of Vance’s “alpha” act involves regularly bullying his wife Usha in public. I’ve covered this heavily on my show “Standing Room Only,” with clips of him making her stand by him and smile painfully while he mocks her, telling a crowd he wants her to convert to Christianity or suggesting she’s better off now that she had to quit her legal career to be his full-time support system.

At a recent event in Michigan, Vance said that he asked her to have a fourth baby in 2024, and she replied, “Well, you can become vice president or you can have a fourth baby.” To complete this charming tale of a man slowly breaking his wife’s will until she is merely a vehicle for his ambitions, he bragged, “I got both.”

But picking on his wife may not be enough for the vice president to meet the domination-oriented definition of “masculinity” that wowed so many male Trump voters in 2024 — especially not when he’s being such a sub to Trump over the Iran war, which is already wildly unpopular, even with a lot of the MAGA influencers Vance has been courting. After his performance in the Oval Office, Vance offered even more embarrassing defenses of Trump and the war at his Michigan event. He called soaring gas prices a “temporary blip,” a statement that will likely come back to haunt him....>

<....“Nobody likes war, and I guarantee the president of the United States is not interested in getting us in the kind of long-term quagmires that we’ve seen in years past,” he said in response to another question.

But perhaps the most obsequious comment was, “Once the president makes a decision, it’s up to everybody who serves in his administration to make it as successful as possible.” This statement wasn’t too pathetic on its face, but it came after a question about Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center who resigned in protest of the war on March 17. Whatever the left’s criticisms of Kent — and I have plenty — there can be no doubt who looks braver.

This is especially true because everyone knows that the vice president privately shares Kent’s skepticism of this war. It’s just that Kent was willing to say it out loud and back it up with action. Vance, on the other hand, performs for the president on camera and complains about his decision to the press through back channels. Vance may hope to distance himself from the administration’s inevitable failure in Iran with stories about anonymous “senior Trump officials” telling POLITICO that Vance “just opposes” the war. But it certainly makes him look cowardly that he can’t even muster the fortitude to say it in public, much less to his boss’s face.

As David Graham at the Atlantic noted, Vance’s public display of submission to Trump isn’t even helping him stay in the capricious president’s good graces. Trump’s doctors may still routinely ask him if he can identify barnyard animals on cognitive tests, but he still has the wits enough to know that the vice president and his allies are probably the source behind these “Vance hates the war” stories. As Salon contributing columnist Heather Digby Parton wrote, Secretary of State Marco Rubio “is being seen in elite circles as [Trump’s] heir apparent” in no small part because Rubio is fully on board with the Iran war and is better at feeding Trump the cheap flattery the president subsists on.

Of course, both Vance and Rubio are clomping around in ugly, oversized shoes because Trump demands it of them. Even before the Iran war, Trump made it clear that being in his inner circle meant checking your dignity at the door. For now, that may not fully emasculate all of them in the eyes of the manosphere types, who also have beclowned themselves for a decade now by holding up the makeup-caked reality TV host as their manly leader.

But Trump is an aging, bruise-and-rash-covered lame duck who broke every promise he made about lowering prices and staying out of wars. By the time 2028 comes around, Vance may very well be an embarrassing reminder to the MAGA brohood of their own failures — and they’ll want him to go away.>

<Former White House strategist and podcaster Steve Bannon said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers assisting with airport operations is a “test run” for the 2026 midterms.

During a conversation with conservative lawyer Mike Davis on his “War Room” program, Bannon asked, “We can use what’s happening with these ICE [officers] helping out at the airports, we can use this as a test run, as a test case to really perfect ICE’s involvement in the 2026 midterm elections, sir?”

Davis responded, “Yeah, I think we should have ICE agents at the polling places, because if you’re an illegal alien you can’t vote, right? It’s against the law, it’s a federal crime for you to vote in federal elections.”

“And so, if you’re an American citizen, you should be happy that ICE is there, because you’re not going to have illegal aliens canceling out your vote,” he added.

“Exactly,” Bannon replied. “Pick ‘em out of line starting today, and maybe the lines will get shorter.”

On Monday, ICE and Homeland Security Investigations officers began supporting Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officers at multiple airports around the country. Amid the Department of Homeland Security shutdown, hundreds of TSA workers have quit the force, and call-out rates have risen significantly — leading to lengthy wait times at security checkpoints nationwide.

White House border czar Tom Homan, who is overseeing the operation, said Monday on SiriusXM’s “Cuomo Mornings” that federal immigration officers will not directly assist with security screenings, but instead will relieve TSA officers from other areas, such as entry and exit lanes to security checkpoints.

President Trump told reporters Monday that the move was “my idea.” He also told NewsNation’s Hannah Brandt on Sunday that ICE officers will assist their TSA counterparts “for as long as it takes.”

Bannon, who has called for ICE officers to have a presence at polling places, praised the surge further after speaking with Davis.

“They’re trained to, wait for it, check IDs,” he said, referring to ICE officers. “That’s why it’s perfect training for the fall of 2026. This is why it’s such a brilliant [move], this is another 5D chess move from President Trump.

“Let’s get ICE into the airports to help out [with] the lines and they can’t work the [X-ray] machines. You know what they’ll do, they’ll just walk on down [and say], ‘Hey, we’re going to speed things through, can we check your IDs?’ That’s what’s going to happen in the fall of ‘26 because folks, we’re tired of having elections stolen. So, ICE is going to be there in the fall of ‘26, just like they’re in the airports today.”>

<Senate Republicans believe that President Trump is willing to accept a potential deal to fund the Department of Homeland Security following a White House meeting on Monday night.

It would be a significant shift for Trump, who over the weekend repeatedly he would not make a deal with Democrats unless they moved separate voting legislation known as the SAVE America Act.

But Trump signaled he is open to a deal to reopen the Homeland Security Department even if it doesn’t fully fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during a two-hour meeting at the White House Monday evening, according to GOP senators briefed on the meeting.

A Senate Republican source familiar with the discussion said Trump is willing to separate funding for the Enforcement and Removal Operation from the Homeland Security appropriations bill in order to get enough Democratic support it.

Under the proposal presented to Trump, Senate Republicans would pass additional money for ICE’s removal operations under the budget reconciliation process, which allows them to circumvent a Democratic filibuster in the Senate as long as the legislation being considered meets certain requirements related to the spending, taxation or deficit reduction.

Senate Republicans told Trump that they would also attempt to pass elements of the SAVE America Act, which Trump has called his No. 1 legislative priority, in the follow-up reconciliation bill.

“I think we showed him that we can run a parallel process where we can fund DHS now and have a second reconciliation bill that would put a down payment on some of the SAVE [America] Act,” said a person familiar with the meeting.

Republican senators who met with Trump later briefed Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) at the Capitol.

Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.), the chair of the Senate Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, told reporters as she returned to the Capitol from the White House meeting that Republicans feel they have a path to ending the Homeland Security shutdown, which will reach its 39th day on Tuesday.

“We do,” Britt said when asked whether the group that met with Trump has a solution to ending the stalemate.

Senators felt they landed in a “pretty good spot” with Trump after the lengthy meeting, according to the person familiar with the discussion.

White House border czar Tom Homan, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who runs much of the administration’s immigration enforcement policies, and newly confirmed secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin attended the meeting, according to sources familiar with it.

Britt met with Trump along with Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Steve Daines (R-Mont.), and Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), who all have good relationships with the president.

Graham, however, was tight-lipped about the prospect of whether Trump would agree to break up the Department of Homeland Security funding bill to reopen the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and other critical agencies, such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Coast Guard.

“We’ll see what happens,” he said. “I’m not going to say anymore, so leave me alone.”

Senate Republicans had presented a similar proposal to Trump over the weekend, when they suggested setting aside funding for ICE to allow the rest of the Homeland Security appropriations bill to pass under regular order and then use the budget reconciliation process later this year to add more money for immigration enforcement operations later this year.

But Trump emphatically rejected that offer this weekend in a private conversation and later panned the idea in an interview with NewsNation and a follow-up post on Truth Social.

“I don’t think any deal should be made on this until they approve Save America,” he told NewsNation’s Hannah Brandt.

Then Trump doubled down on that position in a post on Truth Social, writing: “I don’t think we should make any deal with the Crazy, Country Destroying, Radical Left Democrats unless, and until, they Vote with Republicans to pass ‘THE SAVE AMERICA ACT.’”

Thune on Monday afternoon called Trump’s demand to hold off on passing a deal to reopen the Department of Homeland Security until Democrats agree to the sweeping voting reform bill now pending on the Senate floor was not “realistic.”...>