<Republican lawmakers in the state of Kansas are introducing new pieces of legislation in hopes of implementing more restrictive measures for abortions.

According to Yahoo! News, Republican lawmakers are kicking off the new legislative session with a proposal to roll back reproductive rights. While the majority of the party's lawmakers have lauded the initiative, the report highlights how the majority of Kansas voters have opposing views on abortion.

Per the news outlet: "Senate Bill 65, the new GOP proposal, 'Nothing shall prevent any city or county from regulating abortion within its boundaries as long as the regulation is at least as stringent as or more stringent than imposed by state law. In such cases, the more stringent local regulation shall control.'”

GOP state Sen. Chase Blasi, who introduced and sponsored the bill, insists abortion is a major concern in his district.

“The fight for life continues in Kansas,” said Blasi. “In my district, I have many constituents that are very concerned still about the unborn in our state, and so I introduced legislation today to be had with local constituents, local governments.”

Current laws in the state of Kansas allow for abortions to be carried out legally until the 22nd week of pregnancy. However, the news outlet notes "there are additional restrictions on providers and funding, and minors generally need permission from both parents or legal guardians to undergo the procedure."

Abortion is currently legal in Kansas until the 22nd week of pregnancy. There are additional restrictions on providers and funding, and minors generally need permission from both parents or legal guardians to undergo the procedure.

In a statement written to Yahoo! News, Planned Parenthood of Great Plains Votes spokesperson Anamarie Rebori Simmons offered criticized the bill.

“The irony of this bill is too much," she said.

<Donald Trump reacted to the Monterey Park mass shooting by complaining about Jan. 6 rioters.

Trump said "nothing will happen" to the gunman, compared with those arrested in connection with the riot.

At least 10 people have died in the mass shooting, and the gunman remains at large.

Former President Donald Trump reacted to the mass shooting at Monterey Park, California, by complaining about the treatment of those arrested in connection with the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021.

"10 dead in California shooting, horrible gun wielding ANTIFA protest against our great police in Atlanta - Nothing will happen to them despite night of rage and destruction," Trump wrote on Truth Social on Sunday.

"Yet our January 6th protestors, over a Rigged Election, have had their lives ruined despite nobody killed except true Patriot Ashli B. This situation will be fully rectified after 2024 Election."

At least 10 people died in the mass shooting at a Lunar New Year celebration on Saturday night, and police have said the shooter remains at large.

Along with the Monterey shooting, Trump also referenced a Saturday protest in Atlanta over the killing of an activist by law enforcement, which briefly turned violent when protesters set a police car on fire.

Trump has repeatedly suggested that he would pardon those charged and sentenced in connection with the Capitol riot if he were to be re-elected as president.

At least 978 people have been arrested in connection with the attack, and more than 470 people have pleaded guilty.>

<Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) might not have gotten quite the response he was hoping to hear from his request to peek into investigations of Donald Trump and his Republican allies.

The Department of Justice pledged to cooperate with a congressional investigation into the "weaponization" of the federal government but warned Jordan that longstanding policy forbid [sic] them from confirming or denying the existence of pending investigations or sharing confidential information about such probes, wrote MSNBC columnist Steve Benen.

"It was a polite and professional way of the Justice Department telling the conspiratorial congressman to go pound sand, at least with regard to opening up the files of ongoing investigations," Benen wrote.

The House Judiciary Committee, which Jordan now leads, quickly responded with a tweet suggesting the Justice Department was "scared" to cooperate with the investigation, but Benen wrote off their complaint as bluster.

"It was a difficult line to take seriously," Benen wrote. "For decades, the Justice Department has withheld non-public information about pending investigations, and for good reason: Confidentiality is important to protect the integrity of the process. It does not mean that federal law enforcement is 'scared'; it means Jordan and his cohorts think they’re entitled to information that they can’t have.">

<Responding to backlash over Florida banning a high school advanced placement course on African American history, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis lashed out, saying part of the reason it was banned is it includes “indoctrination” on “queer theory.”

Standing in a school classroom at a podium with a sign that reads, “Florida, the education state,” DeSantis defended the move to block the Black history class while not banning any others.

Acknowledging that “in the state of Florida, our education standards not only don’t prevent but they require teaching Black history, all the important things as part of our core curriculum,” DeSantis called the class “a separate course on top of that for Advanced Placement credit.”

“The issue is we have guidelines and standards in Florida,” he proclaimed, as does every other state in the nation. “We want education, not indoctrination. If you fall on the side of indoctrination, we’re going to decline. If it’s education, then we will do.”

“So when I heard it, we didn’t meet the standards. I figured, yeah, they may be doing…” he said as his voice trailed off. “It’s way more than that,” DeSantis warned.

“This course on Black history. What are one of what’s one of the lessons about? Queer theory,” he criticized.

“Now who would say that an important part of Black history is ‘queer theory”?” DeSantis said mockingly, not recognizing that LGBTQ people are an integral and important part of all races and cultures. The Florida GOP governor has a history of trying to erase LGBTQ people, especially from public school curriculums with his “Don’t Say Gay“ law.

“And so we’re on, that’s the wrong side of the line for Florida standards. We believe in teaching kids facts and how to think, but we don’t believe they should have an agenda imposed on them. When you try to use Black history to shoehorn in queer theory, you are clearly trying to use that for political purposes.”

Governor DeSantis studied history at Yale and taught history at a private college prep school in Georgia.

Last week White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre blasted DeSantis, saying, “let’s not forget,” Florida “didn’t block AP European History. They didn’t block our music history. They didn’t block our art history. But the state chooses to block a course that is meant for high-achieving high school students to learn about the history of arts and culture.”>

<Bad candidates cost the Republican Party plenty in the 2022 election. But with the possible exception of Michigan, in no state did they cost their party like they did in Arizona.

And now we can apply some hard data to just how bad those candidates, including Kari Lake and Blake Masters, were.

It has been clear since election night that Arizona was a major missed opportunity for the GOP. Most of its statewide GOP candidates ran the kind of election-denying, Trump-aligned general-election campaigns that other candidates mostly shied after their primaries. The result: While the GOP had strong turnout, did relatively well down-ballot and won the state treasurer’s race by double digits, it lost campaigns for Senate, governor, attorney general and secretary of state.

As the New York Times’s Nate Cohn noted recently, the electorate in the state tilted Republican by about nine points, with 75 percent of registered Republicans voting, compared to just 69 percent of registered Democrats — and in what had been up until recently a red state.

That would seem to be a recipe for success, but it wasn’t. So it was easy to surmise what had happened in Arizona was like what happened elsewhere, as Cohn wrote: Republican-leaning voters simply didn’t vote for certain Republican candidates.

There’s now compelling evidence this happened on a large scale in Arizona in precisely the races we thought.

The Arizona Republic this weekend highlighted a study of voting in all-important Maricopa County, which accounts for about 60 percent of the state’s electorate. It’s from a group called the “Audit Guys,” which includes a data analyst for the state Republican Party. The study showed the Lake, Masters and other statewide candidates like secretary of state hopeful Mark Finchem lost a significant number of votes from voters who otherwise backed mostly Republicans.

Those voters didn’t just skip those contests, mind you; they voted in large numbers for Democrats. And in some cases, including Lake’s, that appears to have been decisive.

In her case, there were nearly 40,000 voters who didn’t vote for her but otherwise mostly voted Republican across 14 other contests. And about 33,000 of them voted for now-Gov. Katie Hobbs (D). (Some didn’t vote or cast ballots for write-in candidates.)

That crossover vote is about double Lake’s overall, 17,000-vote margin of defeat. Given that Hobbs suffered many fewer defections — only about 8,000 mostly Democratic voters didn’t vote for her, and only about 6,000 voted for Lake — it suggests that the imbalance was decisive. Lake lost by about 27,000 votes among what can loosely be defined as crossover voters.

Lake won about 750,000 votes in Maricopa County, which suggests she squandered about 5 percent of voters who were predisposed to vote for her party, compared to less than 1 percent in Hobbs’s case.

The other race in which this appears to have been decisive was the razor-thin attorney general race. There, the numbers were very similar: GOP nominee Abe Hamadeh lost about 41,000 voters who otherwise cast their ballots for mostly Republicans, and 33,000 of them voted for his Democratic opponent. That’s compared to now-Attorney General Kris Mayes’s (D) loss of 11,000 mostly Democratic voters, 6,000 of whom voted for the Hamadeh, respectively. Given that Hamadeh lost by just 280 votes, this — among many other factors — apparently flipped the race.

Both Lake and Hamadeh have claimed unsuccessfully and without real evidence that these races were rigged; these data show pretty conclusively that they forfeited their races by alienating a potentially decisive number of would-be supporters....>

The best to come....

<....But those weren’t even the worst cases of a GOP candidate forfeiting such votes in Arizona.

In the Senate race, nearly 48,000 Maricopa County voters who otherwise mostly voted Republican voted for Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly over Masters, according to the study. That’s compared to fewer than 2,000 mostly Democratic voters who cast ballots for Masters. That suggests that Masters lost the votes of more than 6 percent of voters who otherwise mostly voted Republican.

In the worst case of all, the secretary of state race, Finchem lost nearly 63,000 votes from voters who mostly voted Republican but cast ballots for now-Secretary of State Adrian Fontes (D). Compared to Finchem’s 700,000 votes in the county, that suggests he forfeited about 8 percent of the votes that were readily available to him as the Republican nominee.

In neither Masters’s nor Finchem’s case was this evidently decisive, but that’s largely because they lost by such large margins overall. Instead, they appear to be symptomatic of their larger problems.

It’s difficult to say with certainty how unusual this is, given the available election data varies by state. It’s true we often see a certain number of crossover voters in a given election.

But in this case, it’s not a symptom of voters simply being registered as a Republican and voting Democratic, whether because they failed to update their registration or for any other reason. This was voters going to the polls and proactively voting for mostly Republicans, but deciding each of these Republicans were a bridge too far for them.

There are a couple comparisons we can draw in Arizona that are illustrative.

The same group, the “Audit Guys,” ran the same study on the 2020 election and found that a similar number of otherwise mostly Republican voters voted for President Biden over Donald Trump: 39,000. But in that election, it was much closer to being offset by Democratic defections, as nearly 22,000 mostly Democratic voters picked Trump over Biden.

Those Democratic defections never really materialized for Lake and Co. So Trump suffered a much-smaller actual crossover effect than each of Lake, Masters, Finchem and Hamadeh. (It’s not as if Trump was a particularly strong candidate in his own right.)

There was, though, one 2022 race in which those reverse defections did materialize. It was in the aforementioned state treasurer’s race, where GOP incumbent Kimberly Yee won by double digits (12 points) overall. That was in large part thanks to more than 52,000 mostly Democratic voters in Maricopa County who voted for her, while she lost fewer than 7,000 mostly GOP voters to her Democratic opponent.

Yee, the only major statewide Arizona GOP candidate not endorsed by Trump, showed it was more than possible to keep those voters in the GOP camp and even appeal across the aisle.

Hahahahaha!

You are a 2900-level practitioner, <nimrod>.

<California attorney regulators said on Thursday they will seek to disbar attorney John Eastman over his involvement in former US president Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election.

The state bar of California charged Eastman, a former personal lawyer to Trump, with 11 counts of ethics violations, including misleading courts and making false public statements about voter fraud in the 2020 election.

Eastman participated in a strategy “unsupported by facts or law” to obstruct the count of presidential electors in Congress following Democrat Joe Biden’s election victory, the bar’s complaint said.

George Cardona, the bar’s chief trial counsel, said his office will ask a court to revoke Eastman’s law license.

An attorney for Eastman, Randall Miller, disputed the allegations on Thursday, saying it was Eastman’s responsibility as a lawyer to provide Trump with a range of legal options to contest the election results.

Eastman, a former law professor at Chapman University in California, drafted legal memos suggesting then vice-president Mike Pence could refuse to accept electoral votes from several swing states when Congress convened to certify the 2020 vote count. Pence rebuffed his arguments, saying he did not have legal authority.

Eastman also represented Trump in a long-shot lawsuit at the US supreme court seeking to invalidate votes in four states where Trump had falsely claimed evidence of widespread voter fraud.

Eastman repeated many of those claims at a rally outside the White House on 6 January 2021, after which a mob of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol and delayed the congressional certification of the election.

Look on this page earlier in the day. perfidious was picking on people again as usual, so I set him straight. perd's act is so old, tired, BORING....>>

<fra diavolo>, as you well know, pathological liar that you are, the only poster who had anything dealt their way was you--why would I have bothered anyone else, tool?

<....He got his ass spanked today. He's probably crying in his forum w/Zee.....>

Try posting here, drunken liar.

Indeed you are.

<Former President Donald Trump's lengthy rants on Truth Social indicate that he "knows what's coming" from the Department of Justice (DOJ), according to former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner on Friday.

"Donald Trump's deranged rants on his third-rate social media platform signal he knows what's coming," read the title for Kirschner's Justice Matters video on YouTube.

Trump has repeatedly targeted the FBI and the DOJ in his social media posts, mostly to claim that he is being scrutinized by the federal government. He is currently being investigated in a number of criminal probes, including the mishandling of hundreds of classified documents that were seized by the FBI last summer at his Mar-a-Lago residence, and his alleged involvement in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. The former president, however, has denied any wrongdoing.

Despite the evidence and the testimonies gathered against him in the Capitol riot probe, Trump still hasn't been held accountable for his alleged involvement in the insurrection on January 6, 2021, when his supporters stormed the Capitol building in an effort to stop Joe Biden's Electoral College certification.

Kirschner on Friday said that he is concerned that the DOJ hasn't held Trump accountable for the riot yet, adding that the current lack of action in holding him accountable for over two years sends a message that his actions will go unpunished.

"[The] DOJ has not held a single suit of the insurrection accountable for the violent attack on the government that they launched to try to keep Donald Trump in power unlawfully, unconstitutionally," he said. "Here's my grave concern, there's a message that has been sent by the Department of Justice to the next aspiring dictator, to the next wanna-be autocrat who might consider trying to violently overthrow our democracy if he loses an election, the message that has been sent by the Department of Justice that if you do what Donald Trump did, if you try to violently overthrow our government, you will have more than two years to plot your next move."

Despite being the subject of state and federal criminal investigations, Trump announced his 2024 presidential bid this past November. However, Kirschner doesn't think he stands a chance of reelection.

"I am not a political analyst or expert but I don't think Donald Trump has a snowball's chance in hell of being elected president again," he said on Friday.

In a video posted to his Truth Social account on Wednesday, the former president said that the "weaponization" of law enforcement and intelligence agencies is the "greatest threat to American freedom in generations."

He also expressed hopes that the House members, who will serve on the newly launched Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, would investigate federal agencies such as the FBI and the DOJ.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy released a list on Tuesday of House members who will serve on the new panel. All of those appointed to the committee are Republicans, including chairman Jim Jordan, Representative Elise Stefanik, Representative Chip Roy, Representative Thomas Massie, and others.

While announcing his picks for the weaponization panel and another subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic, McCarthy said that the government "has a responsibility to serve the American people, not go after them."

"Unfortunately, throughout Democrats' one-party rule in Washington we saw a dangerous pattern of the government being used to target political opponents while they neglected their most basic responsibilities," he added.>

<Donald Trump has been accused of many things over the years - sometimes unfairly. But does this latest accusation mean Trump could finally be charges with a crime? It seems like he came pretty close: CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig’s new book claims that as then-President Donald Trump was preparing to leave the White House in 2021, federal prosecutors in New York were debating whether to charge Trump with campaign finance crimes the moment he left office.

The prosecutors, from the Southern District of New York that oversees New York City, apparently accumulated sizable evidence against Trump as a collateral effect of efforts to prosecute former Trump attorney Michael Cohen in 2018.

Cohen, you may remember, was under investigation for his role in providing hush money to two women claiming affairs with Trump, one of whom was adult film star Stormy Daniels. The prosecutors did not consider bringing charges against Donald Trump at the time because he was still the sitting president and the sitting president cannot be indicted.

Yet as Trump prepared to leave office, the acting US attorney, Audrey Strauss, led discussions with other prosecutors to discuss the evidence that had been gathered against Trump. “They decided to not seek an indictment Trump for several reasons,” CNN reported, “including the political ramifications and the fact that Trump’s other scandals, such as efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and the January 6, 2021, insurrection, “made the campaign finance violations seem somehow trivial and outdated by comparison.””

As one person familiar with the Strauss discussions told Honig, “we were well aware of the prudential reasons why you wouldn’t charge a president, even after he was out of office.”

Could Donald Trump still be prosecuted?

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg seems to be reconsidering whether to charge Trump for the hush money scheme. Bragg hosted Cohen recently – for the first time in over a year – indicating that there may be movement against Trump on the hush money front.

A lot of the leg work toward a Trump prosecution has already been carried out. Prosecutors had created a draft indictment of Cohen that included “exhaustive detail of Trump’s central involvement in the hush money scheme,” Honig wrote.

“The draft Cohen indictment was a full accounting, running over fifty pages in one iteration – essentially both a formal indictment of Cohen and a public excoriation of Trump, only without charges attached,” Honig wrote. “The SDNY’s draft indictment left no doubt: Trump wasn’t merely a bystander or an unwitting beneficiary of the campaign finance crime. He was the driving force behind the scheme, and likely criminally liable for it.”

The final draft of the indictment against Cohen scaled back the language against Donald Trump, however – who was referred to only as “Individual-1.” Although, for a time, the prosecutors debated whether to list Trump as “Co-conspirator 1,” which would have been inflammatory.

Actually, the DOJ’s principal deputy associate attorney general said the “co-conspirator” label would have been “unfair to Trump” because he was not being charged with a crime and that his reputation would be harmed and challenged, without giving him “a formal mechanism to defend himself.” So, prosecutor’s settled for the “Individual-1” label.

Cohen did ultimately plead guilty, stating that he worked “in coordination and at the direction of a candidate for federal office.” The New York prosecutors were eager to take on Trump then – but hindered by political considerations (and the DOJ).

Maybe the prosecutors will “circle back” and take another look at bringing charges against Donald Trump – it seems like just about everyone else is.>

<I'd certainly like to know why <stone free or die> is allowed to constantly rate and bash any and all members in the forums. sfod is the town crier! It's a non-stop problem. Who gives a hoot what sfod's opinion is of others. sfod needs to worry about his own lacking character. sfod's statements are personal attacks -- constant degrading of paying members. Honesty has never been in sfod's realm for long, often manipulating for rules changes to take advantage of them against other members, or simply for political preference (which is a whole nother issue that CGs should avoid)....>

Where does <zed> engage in this 'rating' of others?

Perhaps you should tend to your own personal failings before assailing others. You cry about others' personal attacks--yet you routinely come out with both barrels when someone provokes your ire.

<<stone free or die> is a well-known long-term troll plain and simple. Always has been, always will be. Struggles to post anything intelligent about chess unless it was copied from another source. Stone's behavior has not changed since operating dozens of sock puppet accounts to harass others under multiple guises; it continues, but at least it's limited to the same few accounts....>

What qualifies you to judge others' contributions? You pander to beginning players and routinely post in the manner of <uluseless>, who also believes no-one on this site possess a scintilla of skill. You also spam game pages with pointless lists of opening lines which in no way pertain to the game in question.

<....This maligning of members in the forums is so very wrong by ANYONE of ANYONE. People should not have to read this garbage on a daily basis just to defend themselves from a troll and political buddies....>

Except, of course, when you feel wronged--then the hammer is their lot.

<....If you want to allow people to freely post their concerns and outright lies publicly -- fine. It's wrong to degrade people in public, but the administration seems to enjoy this nonsense. Let these cons post their hatred, read their post, and then DELETE their post. You got the message, so DELETE IT. It's total bunk that low class people are allowed to spew their hatred of others and it remains in print for days, weeks, permanently....>

While it is more'n okay for you to disgorge your latest round of vitriol against your target of puerile outrage.

<....Read it, and GET RID OF IT. Such backstabbing should never remain in print. FOLLOW YOUR OWN DAMN GUIDELINES!!>

You surely do fancy yourself in charge of CG, a site which would not last overlong if you ran things.

<....Take the garbage out -- clean up this website!>

<NBC host Chuck Todd confronted Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) after he suggested there is a two-tier justice system for Republicans and Democrats because a search warrant was used to search former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate after he refused to cooperate with the Justice Department.

"You keep talking about this raid on Donald Trump," Todd told Jordan during an interview on Sunday. "There was nine months between the initial action the archives made for a request of documents before they even turned it over to the Justice Department. The subpoena was issued 60 days before they actually executed the subpoena. And more importantly, the only time the public found out about it is because Donald Trump told the public about it."

"It was actually a year and a half of Donald Trump not complying with any of the requests from the National Archives," he noted. "A year and a half! This is not some sort of proof that somehow they've weaponized and are playing politics [at the Justice Department]."

"They raided Trump's home; they haven't raided [President Joe Biden's]," Jordan replied.

"Because Biden didn't defy a subpoena!" Todd shot back.

Jordan argued that Trump's documents were protected by a locked room and the Secret Service while Biden's were not.

"You do not seem to ever see the same conspiratorial problems when it's a Republican," Todd concluded.>

<While the focus on Donald Trump's influence on the judiciary is normally centered on the three associate justices he appointed to the Supreme Court -- Amy Coney Barrett, Brent Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch -- his real impact is being felt in New Orleans where the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals resides and has been cranking out rulings so extreme it has created tension amongst the justices.

According to a deep dive by the Washington Post, Trump's imprint on the courts is on full display since he appointed a half dozen judges to that court who are described as "young, ambitious and outspoken" and have shaken things up with their disdain for previous rulings.

As the Post's Ann Marimow wrote, "Their rulings have at times broken with precedent and exposed rifts among the judges, illustrating Trump’s lasting legacy on the powerful set of federal courts that operate one step below the Supreme Court. Even some veteran conservatives on the court have criticized the newcomers for going too far."

Noting that four of the six served as advisors to Texas lawmakers, Marimow added, "With their provocative, colloquial writing styles, the judges are elevating their profiles in far-reaching opinions and public appearances, calling out 'cancel culture,' wokeness and sometimes even one another."

Chief among them is Judge James C. Ho who has called for a boycott of Yale Law School students as law clerks because of free speech policies at their school that he finds deplorable.

According to the report, the 5th Circuit has now become the go-to court for conservative activists looking for a sympathetic ear.

In an interview, Steve Vladeck, a University of Texas School of Law professor, explained, "These are the most conservative federal judges in the country having cases specifically brought so that they can decide them at a time when the Supreme Court is reversing some of their decisions, but not all of them. There’s nothing to lose."

A former 5th Circuit law clerk who now works at the Georgetown Center for the Constitution at Georgetown Law agreed.

“The reason it seems like there’s so much fire coming from the 5th Circuit is that they are getting really divisive cases,” explained Alexa Gervasi. “If you send controversial cases to the 5th Circuit, you’re going to get controversial opinions.”

"Of the 17 full-time spots on the 5th Circuit bench, 12 are held by judges nominated by Republican presidents and four by judges picked by Democratic presidents. One seat remains unfilled by Biden. The appeals courts almost always hear cases in three-judge panels drawn mainly from the court’s full-time judges, making the odds of having more than one Democratic pick on any panel unlikely," the Post report notes. "But the combination on the 5th Circuit of big personalities and aspirations — and the large volume of highly charged cases — makes the New Orleans bench a standout."

Gervasi added that there is stiff competition when it comes to writing opinions, explaining, "Everyone wants to have their say. I don’t think that’s just posturing for the Supreme Court.”

The report added, "Just as the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, with a trio of justices picked by Trump, has gravitated away from the restrained, go-slow approach of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., so too has the 5th Circuit issued rulings that depart from precedent or the decisions of other appeals courts. Two of the new judges used to work for members of the Supreme Court’s conservative bloc: Oldham is a former clerk to Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who wrote the opinion eliminating the nationwide right to abortion, and Ho, a former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas.">

<House Republicans, brash and cocky, think they’re on the offense in demanding huge spending cuts in order to pass an essential debt ceiling measure — expecting President Biden will chicken out, back down.

It’s more likely they will end up on the defense, scrambling to devise a budget/spending plan acceptable to the most right-wing fringe of the GOP House conference and that can muster 218 votes to pass.

The worst case is they replicate “Buzz Gunderson,” the cocky tough guy in the classic movie, “Rebel without a Cause,” who challenged James Dean to a game of chicken, a car race approaching a cliff to see who jumped out first.

Gunderson went over the cliff.

With this crew of Republicans, it’s more like Wile-E-Coyote going over the cliff … except the real consequences could be dire.

To satisfy the demands of the hard core, calling in the chits and private deals that enabled Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to squeak into the Speakership, a debt/budget proposal would have to be big and include cuts to Social Security and/or Medicare, which comprise a third of the federal budget. That’s what they’re talking about; it’s a political loser, especially if tied to the debt ceiling.

“If we can’t win that fight, we ought to be in another business,” says Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), the ranking Democrat on the House Budget committee.

The debt limit battle probably won’t be fully joined until this summer. And the GOP already is talking about postponing any showdown.

This spring the Republicans will unveil a budget, short of many specifics and long on gimmicks — wildly optimistic economic assumptions, big savings through rooting out “waste, fraud and abuse.” To achieve their promise of a balanced budget in ten years, they have to come up with some real humongous reductions, almost inevitably with cuts in entitlements — even while dressing them up as “reform” and vowing not to touch current recipients.

They can fuzz up the first exercise enough to create an “imaginary” budget, but “They can’t get there because the math is impossible,” suggests Boyle.

The debt ceiling is being used only as a vehicle for political leverage. It covers previous obligations and has nothing to do with future spending.

It does represent the full faith and credit of the United States.

If a crucial deadline is missed and there’s a government shutdown, the U.S. credit rating may be downgraded. If it’s a long stalemate, it could be an economic catastrophe.

With only a four-vote margin and enough members insisting anything more than token defense cuts are off the table, this is McCarthy’s dilemma: Do enough to satisfy the right-wing nuts and not too much to alienate the usually “timid twenty,” the members who won by less than 1 percent last year or represent districts carried by Joe Biden in 2020. That will be a very elusive fault line....>

<....There are a couple other complications.

Republicans have promised to consider major legislation under an open rule that allows numerous proposed amendments; that could result in chaos.

If a congressional leader loses a major legislative floor vote, it’s usually devastating. McCarthy’s predecessor, Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), with a similarly narrow margin, never lost a major vote.

Moreover, if McCarthy fails to satisfy the hard-core right, one of them might offer a privileged motion to dump him; if all the Democrats oppose McCarthy, it would only take five Republicans to oust him.

If the Republicans try to really slash discretionary domestic spending — and not touch Social Security, Medicare, Defense or taxes — it will be daunting. That leaves only a relatively small fraction of the budget, and there are political untouchables like veteran benefits, border security, or much of the now popular affordable health care measure.

They may have to recycle the old gambit of creating a commission to study entitlements; Democrats will insist it look at taxes too, which the Republican right will reject.

The White House needs to do a better job of committing to negotiations over long-term budget issues, but not tied to the debt ceiling.

Senate Republicans — so far — are content to sit back and let their House counterparts take the heat.

The most probable scenario later this year, close observers fear, is with a zealous band of right-wingers and a weak Speaker, there’ll be a government shutdown and some sort of default with ugly consequences.

This is another reminder of what a travesty the debt ceiling is.

There are legitimate spending and budgetary battles. They should be fought out in regular order: the authorizations and appropriations process.

Some day, maybe a sensible Congress will enact the reform proposal by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Rep. Boyle. It would give the Treasury Secretary authority to set the debt ceiling subject to a two house congressional veto.

It would go a long way to ending these dangerous games.>

<United States Representative Mike Turner (R-Ohio), who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, claimed during an interview on Sunday's edition of This Week that President Joe Biden snuck classified documents from Washington "on the train back home" to Delaware while he was serving in the Senate and then as vice president.

The conversation was focused on how and why sensitive materials keep turning up at the homes of high-level elected officials such as Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence. While no crimes have been alleged, Turner nonetheless believes that Biden acted suspiciously. And ABC moderator Martha Raddatz was deeply skeptical of that assessment.

Biden "clearly was taking them repeatedly on the train back home and putting them in boxes in his garage. That repeated action is certainly concerning, but the overall evidence that it was a repeated action, these are classified," Turner said.

When Raddatz requested proof to substantiate that accusation, Turner had none to provide.

"Do you have any evidence it was a repeated action? Sir, do you have evidence or anything about the train, for instance?" Raddatz asked.

What you actually have reported yourself, that some of these documents relate back to when he was a senator and some of these documents relate to the time when he was vice president. That's over several decades and over a great deal of time, and he famously tells us he was on the train going from Washington DC to his house. We know they didn't just fly there on their own. He would have had to have taken them. And having done so over a series of decades certainly is of a concern because it's a practice. But the point that you're making, which I think is the, the one we need to focus on, is that these classified documents contain information that we don't want anyone else to see, that we don't want anyone else to know, because they put at risk our country. They put at risk, as you reported – with great report, by the way – about the concerns of classified documents, that these actually put people's lives at risk who are working to try to protect our country and to keep our secrets safe.

Raddatz, however, was still curious about the origin of Turner's train tale – which she pointed out was not herself.

"And I just want to go back to the train? Because I certainly didn't report that he did that on the train," Raddatz noted. "Do you think Mike Pence brought those documents to his home just the same way you're saying that Biden did, or we just don't know?"

Turner steadfastly maintained his speculation:

*Well, we don't know. But what we do know is that the vice president has said that he was not involved in the packing of these, that they were transported to his house after he was vice president. We don't know. Obviously, the chain of custody in each of these issues is going to be important. It certainly should be part of the Department of justice investigation. How did these documents get where they were going and where we ultimately found them, but also what happened to them in the interim? How did they get into the hands of both the vice president/senator, President Biden, the Vice President Pence and, of course, [former] President [Donald] Trump? How did they get into their hands and then how did they get where we ultimately found them?>

<And that message confirmed what 'opponents ' of revocation of ban of <George wallace>/<big pawn> have been saying all along - everyone saw the confrontational/aggressive/defiant tone of that message. This guy wants to fight all the time - and in a dishonest , vile manner. That is what we have seen over the years and his latest message saying loud and clear that leopard not going to change his spots. He not going to change . Always trying his best to antagonize/offend/fight those 'infidels ' who do not follow his religious beliefs.>

Verily, <fagasaurus, otiose offal> should be banned for good and all--he is naught but a menace to the community.

<At the height of the Watergate scandal, as Richard Nixon prepared to resign, the then-president still had a handful of unyielding Republican allies. One of them, Rep. Earl Landgrebe of Indiana, was asked about his perspective the day before Nixon left the White House in disgrace.

“Don’t confuse me with the facts,” the then-congressman told reporters. “I’ve got a closed mind.”

The comments came to mind again yesterday watching House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan on “Meet the Press.” NBC News reported:

The Ohio congressman, who’s more frequently seen on media outlets aligned with Republican politics, will lead his party’s new panel on the “weaponization” of federal powers, and he was eager to make the case that his initiative has merit. Jordan noted, for example, the FBI “raided the home of a former president 91 days before an election.”

First, it wasn’t a “raid.” Second, the search was executed at a glorified country club, not a house. Third, it was ahead of an election in which Trump wasn’t on the ballot.

But as the “Meet the Press” host was quick to remind his guest, the contextual details matter, too.

“There was nine months between the initial action. ... the [National] Archives requested documents before they even turned it over to the Justice Department,” Todd explained. “The subpoena was issued 60 days before they actually executed a subpoena.

“And more importantly, the only time the public found out about it is because Donald Trump told the public about it. This was not some sort of new painted as a picture of the FBI did this, this and this within hours of each other, when it was actually a year and a half of Donald Trump not complying with any of the requests from National Archives. This is not some sort of proof that somehow they’ve been weaponized and playing politics.”

Jordan seemingly heard the host, but following Landgrebe’s example from a half-century ago, the powerful far-right lawmaker didn’t want to be confused by facts. “They raided Trump’s home,” the Ohioan responded. “They haven’t raided Biden’s home.”

This, naturally, led the host to again remind Jordan about reality. “Because Biden didn’t defy a subpoena, congressman,” Todd said. “[Trump] defied a subpoena. By the way, he had 60 days to comply.”

Reminded of these important details, which utterly discredited the point he was foolishly trying to make, Jordan — who grinned as the “Meet the Press” host presented him with accurate information — proceeded as if he hadn’t heard a word Todd said.

“They raided Trump,” the committee chairman added in response, returning to the arguments that had been shredded moments earlier.

Earlier in the same interview, Todd noted that if the “weaponization” committee were looking for actual evidence of an administration that tried to use federal agencies against its perceived political foes, it would seemingly have a responsibility to examine the Trump administration’s efforts to abuse the power of the Justice Department. After the host referenced a series of controversies involving abuses of Trump-era law enforcement, Todd asked, “If you are concerned about the weaponization of the Justice Department in the Biden years, why not investigate the Trump years?”

Jordan — who appeared on the “Meet the Press” set, seated just a few feet away from the host — acted as if he literally hadn’t heard the question, and proceeded to talk about Twitter-related conspiracy theories.

At times, watching the Judiciary Committee chairman push ridiculous talking points, it’s only natural to wonder how he’d respond to factual details that debunk his partisan crusades. Yesterday, however, we didn’t have to wonder: Todd tried to make Jordan aware of the truth, and the congressman simply filtered it in such a way as to disregard accurate information he apparently didn’t want to know.

By all appearances, the far-right lawmaker didn’t want to be confused by facts.>

<The Republican Party was once a traditionalist institution that stood for small government, low taxes and conservative social policies. But today’s GOP is a shell of its former self.

The GOP of 2023 is embroiled in chaos and beset by internal strife. Many members who have been elevated to senior positions within the party are not concerned with governing, only with advancing their political agenda and causing disruption for disruption’s sake.

This is not conjecture, rather, it is the view of a sizable share of the American electorate, including many voters who self-identify as Republicans, according to new polling conducted by Schoen Cooperman Research.

Registered voters nationwide believe that the Republican majority in the U.S. House is more focused on pursuing investigations of President Biden and the Democratic Party (49 percent) rather than on passing legislation to address major issues (35 percent). Notably, 4 in 10 Republican voters think that their own party is more focused on investigating Biden and Democrats (41 percent) than on advancing real reforms (47 percent).

There is also a sense among both national voters and Republican voters that the highest-ranking GOP official, Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), is ineffective and beholden to the far-right.

Earlier this month, McCarthy was elected Speaker of the House in a pyrrhic victory after an embarrassing four-day-long fiasco and 15 rounds of voting. McCarthy struck a corrupt bargain with the far-right House Freedom Caucus that essentially gives these extremists veto authority over his speakership along with key leadership positions, rendering him essentially powerless.

As a result, only 1 in 5 (21 percent) Republican voters — and a slightly smaller share of the national electorate (16 percent) — believe McCarthy will be a “very effective” Speaker of the House.

Further, a majority of voters nationwide (53 percent) and a plurality of Republican voters (46 percent) agree that “Kevin McCarthy conceded too much ground to the conservative House Freedom Caucus in order to be elected as Speaker, leaving him with little actual authority and beholden to the far-right.” Remarkably, just one-quarter (27 percent) of Republican respondents in our poll disagreed with this statement....>

<....When pressed further on their views of intraparty politics, GOP voters are relatively split on the question of whether McCarthy should’ve been elected speaker (40 percent) or if it should have been someone else (37 percent). Further, less than one-half (46 percent) of this group believes that the fight McCarthy underwent won’t impact his authority, while more than one-third (35 percent) say it indicates McCarthy doesn’t have the full support of his party and thus won’t be able to get things done.

Just weeks into his tenure, a clearly weakened McCarthy is already struggling to articulate — let alone advance — a Republican plan for raising the debt ceiling. This is one of the most pressing matters facing Congress, as the United States is months away from defaulting on its debt, which would trigger catastrophic consequences for the world economy.

The current House Republican caucus is adamant about using spending cuts as a bargaining chip for raising the county’s borrowing limit but has no unified plan for which programs it wants to be cut and no strategy for actual debt reduction.

Last year, McCarthy signaled that House Republicans could take an extreme route and demand cuts to programs, potentially including Social Security and Medicare, in order to raise the debt limit — a scenario that nearly two-thirds of voters (63 percent), including 54 percent of Republican voters, would disapprove of, according to our poll. In an interview with CBS’s “Face The Nation” on Sunday, McCarthy reversed this position and said cuts to Social Security and Medicare are “off the table.”

Occurring alongside the intraparty debt ceiling debacle, the Republican National Committee just concluded a bitter contest to elect the organization’s next chair.

Incumbent Ronna McDaniel, who was hand-picked by former president Donald Trump, faced a formidable challenge from Harmeet Dhillon, a California lawyer who positioned herself as being able to offer new leadership for the GOP, which has suffered a string of defeats in recent elections.

Unlike the fight McCarthy endured to become Speaker, the race for RNC chair wasn’t necessarily a battle between the far-right and the establishment, per se. And even though McDaniel was ultimately reelected, the final vote total and Dhillon’s ability to make this race competitive by promoting herself as a ‘change’ candidate reflects the polarization and division that exists inside the GOP.

While The Democratic Party has at times appeared hopelessly divided and bogged down by intraparty feuds, The Republican Party is facing a once-in-a-generation reckoning, as cracks in its coalition are turning into gaping holes, posing real risks to the party’s future electability.>