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Post by Webster on Sept 22, 2023 14:49:23 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Biden and Harris to deliver address on first federal gun violence officeJoe Biden is expected to announce the nation’s first federal Office of Gun Violence Prevention during a Rose Garden event at 2.45pm Eastern time. The office will be overseen by the office of the vice president, Kamala Harris, who will also be speaking at the event. In a statement released on Thursday, Biden said: In the absence of that sorely-needed action, the Office of Gun Violence Prevention along with the rest of my Administration will continue to do everything it can to combat the epidemic of gun violence that is tearing our families, our communities, and our country apart.
Throughout his presidency, Joe Biden has used executive actions to regulate homemade firearms – known as ghost guns – in the same way as traditional firearms, and to clarify who counts as a gun seller and thus is required by law to conduct background checks. Last year he also signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, a sweeping piece of legislation that, among other things, tightens background checks and bolsters mental health programs. Biden has advocated for re-instating the national assault weapons ban and expanding background checks since he was vice-president. A historic increase in gun homicides in 2020 pushed community-based violence prevention further up the administration’s agenda.
Tennessee state representative Justin Jones has been spotted heading to the Rose Garden ahead of Joe Biden’s speech announcing the formation of the nation’s first federal Office of Gun Violence Prevention, according to a White House pool report. Jones is one of the “Tennessee Three”, along with Justin Pearson and Gloria Johnson, who was expelled earlier this year for his role in a pro-gun control protest inside the Tennessee Capitol.
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Post by Webster on Sept 22, 2023 14:53:45 GMT -5
(The Guardian) One in five Americans have lost a family member to gun violence, says HarrisKamala Harris, speaking at the Rose Garden, said Americans “should be able to shop in a grocery store, walk down the street, or sit peacefully in a classroom” and be safe from gun violence. The US has been “torn apart by the fear and trauma that results from gun violence”, the vice president said, standing besides Joe Biden and Florida congressman Maxwell Frost. -- In our country today, one in five people has lost a family member to gun violence. Across our nation every day, about 120 Americans are killed by a gun.The impact of gun violence is not equal across all communities, she said. -- Black Americans are 10 times more likely to be victims of gun violence and homicide. Latino Americans twice as likely.Harris said that, as a former courtroom prosecutor, she had seen “with my own eyes what a bullet does to the human body”. -- We cannot normalise any of this. These are not simply statistics. These are our children. 'We do not have a moment to spare': Harris urges gun control actionHarris said she “owed” it to the parents and children she has comforted who has been traumatized by losing a family member to gun violence. -- On this issue, we do not have a moment to spare nor a life to spare.The vice president said the administration will “use the full power of the federal government” to “strengthen the coalition of survivors, and advocates, and students, and teachers, and elected leaders, to save lives and fight for the rights of all people to be safe from fear”.
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Post by Webster on Sept 22, 2023 14:54:49 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Joe Biden, who was introduced by Florida congressman Maxwell Frost, announced the creation of the first ever federal office of gun violence prevention and said he was “determined to send a clear message about how important this issue is to me and to the country”. He said that after every mass shooting, he has heard the same message all over the country: “Please do something. Do something to prevent a tragedy.” He said his administration has been working “relentlessly to do something”. He said that last year, he signed into law the bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which he descried as “the most significant gun safety law” and an “important first step”. -- For the first time in three decades, we came together to overcome the relentless opposition from a gun lobby, gun manufacturers and so many politicians opposing common sense gun legislation. “We’re not stopping here,” Biden added.
Biden urged that “it’s time to ban assault weapons, high capacity magazines”, and for Congress to do more. He said the new federal Office of Gun Violence will be overseen by Kamala Harris, who has been “on the frontlines” her entire career as a prosecutor and as a attorney general. Listing the four primarily responsibilities of the newly formed office, he said none of those steps would alone “solve the entirety of the gun violence epidemic”. “Together, they will save lives,” he said. -- I never thought even remotely say this in my whole career: guns are the number one killer of children in America. Guns are the number one killer of children in America.In 2023, more than 500 mass shootings have taken place and "well over 30,000” deaths as a result of gun violence, he said, describing it as “totally unacceptable”.
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Post by Webster on Sept 25, 2023 14:17:37 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Joe Biden has just released a statement applauding yesterday’s announcement of a tentative agreement to end the five-month-long Hollywood writers’ strike. The deal came amid a wave of strikes in major American industries, including the auto sector. Tomorrow, Biden is expected to visit a United Auto Workers picket line in Michigan, in what will be a historic show of solidarity with striking workers for a president who campaigned on his friendliness to organized labor. Commenting on the agreement to resolve one of two major strikes facing Hollywood, Biden said: This agreement, including assurances related to artificial intelligence, did not come easily. But its formation is a testament to the power of collective bargaining. There simply is no substitute for employers and employees coming together to negotiate in good faith toward an agreement that makes a business stronger and secures the pay, benefits, and dignity that workers deserve. I urge all employers to remember that all workers - including writers, actors, and autoworkers - deserve a fair share of the value their labor helped create.
Not one to miss out on a trip to Michigan, Donald Trump will also visit striking auto workers in the state on Wednesday, the Associated Press reports. It’s unclear what kind of reception he’ll receive from United Auto Workers strikers. Union members are traditionally Democratic, but ever since his 2016 election victory, Trump and other Republicans have made inroads among the white, non-college-degree-holding demographic, much to Democrats’ consternation. The former president actually managed to carry Michigan in that election, the first time a GOP candidate has done so since 1988, though Joe Biden won it back in 2020 and it has seen a string of Democratic victories since then. Trump’s visit to the strike will come in lieu of his participation in the second Republican presidential debate, which is set for that evening. He’s decided to skip it, much as he did the first debate held last month.
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Post by Webster on Sept 25, 2023 14:18:22 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Despite everything, Donald Trump’s devotees remain numerous nationwide, the Guardian’s David Smith reported over the weekend: Wearing a shirt festooned with countless images of Donald Trump, Leverne Martin was looking cheerful for a man who had set off from Poplar Bluff, Missouri, at 9pm and driven through the night, arriving in Dubuque, Iowa, at 5.30am. When did he intend to sleep?
“As soon as President Trump is back in the White House,” the 55-year-old handyman replied without missing a beat. “If we don’t get him back in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, where he belongs, we’re in a mess, man. That’s why I’m voting for President Trump. That’s why I drove nine hours.”
On a grey, rainy day, Martin was near the head of a long and winding queue outside a cavernous conference centre overlooking the Mississippi River. Like so many fans in so many towns and cities over nearly a decade, an overwhelmingly white crowd had come to cheer on Trump, elected US president in 2016, beaten by Joe Biden in 2020 and clear frontrunner for the Republican nomination in 2024.
What is striking about the traveling circus is not what has changed over that time but what has stayed the same. Hawkers still move up and down the line selling Trump calendars, keychains and other regalia with captions such as “Gun rights matter”, “Fight for Trump”, “Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president”, “No more bullshit”, “Trumpinator: I’ll be back” and “Fuck Biden and fuck you for voting for him”. Trump, 77, still puts on a show unlike anyone else in politics. Twentieth-century music from Abba, Celine Dion, Elvis Presley and Whitney Houston booms from loudspeakers. Video clips of allies such as the broadcaster Tucker Carlson and Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán receive cheers and those of foes such as Biden and the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, elicit boos and jeers.
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Post by Webster on Sept 26, 2023 15:50:46 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Donald Trump has launched a lengthy and largely baseless attack on wind turbines for causing large numbers of whales to die, claiming that “windmills” are making the cetaceans “crazy” and “a little batty”. Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, used a rally in South Carolina to assert that while there was only a small chance of killing a whale by hitting it with a boat, “their windmills are causing whales to die in numbers never seen before. No one does anything about that.” “They are washing up ashore,” said Trump, the twice-impeached former US president and gameshow host who is facing multiple criminal indictments. -- You wouldn’t see that once a year – now they are coming up on a weekly basis. The windmills are driving them crazy. They are driving the whales, I think, a little batty.Trump has a history of making false or exaggerated claims about renewable energy, previously asserting that the noise from wind turbines can cause cancer, and that the structures “kill all the birds”. In that case, experts say there is no proven link to ill health from wind turbines, and that there are far greater causes of avian deaths, such as cats or fossil fuel infrastructure. There is also little to support Trump’s foray into whale science.
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Post by Webster on Sept 28, 2023 15:53:03 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Crosstalk and weak zingers hand win to absent Trump at Republican debateIt’s hard to pick the low point of a debate that dissolved frequently into incoherent crosstalk and included former vice-president Mike Pence, a Christian conservative who has famously said he would never dine alone with a woman other than his wife, attempting to make a joke about his sex life. (“My wife isn’t a member of the teachers union, but I gotta admit I’ve been sleeping with a teacher for 38 years,” he said.) Whether echoing Donald Trump’s rhetoric, or attempting to criticize him – Chris Christie dubbed him “Donald Duck” for choosing not to participate – none of the presidential hopefuls succeeded in upending the expectations of the race. Once again, Trump won the GOP debate without even having to show up. On substantive issues, the Republican candidates endorsed virulent transphobia, with entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy arguing that “transgenderism” is “a mental health disorder”. He said he wanted to end birthright citizenship, so that children born in the US to undocumented parents would not be given citizenship. Florida governor Ron DeSantis suggested he would address the fentanyl overdose crisis by using the US military against drug dealers in Mexico, and treat them like “foreign terrorist organizations”. He also did not believe Republican losses in the 2022 midterm elections should be blamed on the party’s embrace of extreme anti-abortion policies. Pence said his plan for preventing future mass shootings was not new gun control laws, but instituting “a federal expedited death penalty for anyone involved in a mass shooting”. (Research shows that many mass shooters are suicidal.) But some of the brutal Trumpian rhetoric seemed to have lost its punch. “Yes, we’ll build the wall,” DeSantis said, sounding almost bored. On Fox News after the debate, former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway argued that “nobody made the case” that they had something different from Trump to offer voters. “They want to build a wall, they want to secure the border, they sound a lot like him,” she said.
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Post by Webster on Sept 28, 2023 15:57:58 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Donald Trump’s rivals also tried, and largely failed, to produce memorable attack lines against each other during last night’s Republican primary debate. South Carolina senator Tim Scott tried to criticize former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley for a set of $50,000 curtains at her residence as UN ambassador. “Do your homework, Tim, because Obama bought those curtains,” Haley responded. Haley, in turn, savaged 38-year-old entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy for doing business in China and for joining the social media app TikTok, which Ramaswamy defended as a logical thing to do to help the party attract younger voters, even as he said that people under 16 should not be “using addictive social media”. “TikTok is one of the most dangerous social media apps that we could have,” Haley said. -- Honestly, every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber for what you say.“We can’t trust you,” she said. “We can’t trust you.”
The reviews were mixed. New York Times political correspondent Maggie Haberman wrote early in the debate, “This is unwatchable.” But Fox News’ Laura Ingraham argued after the debate that Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy were the most promising candidates in two flavors – Ramaswamy as the populist, Haley as the more traditional conservative supported by GOP donors. Ramaswamy seemed at one point to flaunt his youth and inexperience, acknowledging that as the “new guy”, he expected that voters would see him as “a young man who’s in a bit of a hurry, maybe a little ambitious, bit of a know-it-all”. -- I’m here to tell you, no, I don’t know it all. I will listen. I will have the best people, the best and brightest in this country, whatever age they are, advising me.Tim Scott earned applause from the audience and praise from Sean Hannity for saying that, while he had experienced discrimination as a Black man, “America is not a racist country.” At the end of the debate, moderator Dana Perino of Fox News asked the candidates: “Which one of you onstage tonight should be voted off the island?” Almost everyone refused to reply. When Christie did, he attacked the one person who wasn’t on that particular island. Donald Trump.
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Post by Webster on Sept 28, 2023 16:00:19 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Donald Trump billed his Wednesday primetime speech in Michigan as a gesture of solidarity with striking autoworkers. The event doubled as a distraction from the night’s Republican primary debate, where other candidates discussed how they would help striking autoworkers. On two very different stages, Trump and the seven other Republicans faced the same challenge. American support for labor unions is at a 57-year-high, and union workers – especially the thousands of auto workers currently on strike – are a coveted voting bloc that could help secure the White House in 2024. Except there’s one problem: the Republican party doesn’t like unions. In the decades since Ronald Reagan’s presidency, GOP lawmakers championed “right to work” laws designed to limit union membership. In 2021, Congressional Republicans overwhelmingly voted against a bill that would make it easier for workers to form unions. Some candidates have already antagonized unions, with Senator Tim Scott last week suggesting that the striking autoworkers ought to be fired. But the United Auto Workers strike is growing. This week, Joe Biden became the first sitting president to join the picket line, shifting the GOP’s calculus of which Republican is most likely to win the general election. The eight Republican candidates attempted to reconcile GOP policy and politics on Wednesday, with uneven results.
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Post by Webster on Sept 29, 2023 17:52:33 GMT -5
(The Guardian) White House threatens to veto short-term government funding measure backed by House RepublicansThe White House is threatening to veto a bill backed by House Republicans that would extend federal government funding through October and make deep cuts to departments’ budgets while boosting border security. The House GOP has proposed the Spending Reduction and Border Security Act as their solution to the looming government shutdown, which will begin on Sunday unless Congress approves more funding. While votes on the act are expected in the House later today, the White House Office of Management and Budget has said Joe Biden will veto the legislation if it comes to his desk. Here’s more from their statement: The Administration strongly opposes House passage of H.R. 5525, making continuing appropriations for fiscal year 2024, and for other purposes. Hours before a Government shutdown, House Republicans are playing partisan games instead of working in a bipartisan manner to fund the Government and address emergency needs. In a blatant violation of the funding agreement the Speaker and the President reached just a few months ago, the bill endangers the vital programs Americans rely on by making reckless cuts to programs, regardless of the consequences for critical services from education to food safety to law enforcement to housing to public health. It also fails to address key emergency funding needs where lives are at stake, ignoring the Administration’s request for resources to combat the fentanyl crisis and effectively manage the border, support the people of Ukraine as they defend their homeland from Russia’s illegal war, and stand with communities across America as they recover from natural disasters. In addition, H.R. 5525 fails to provide the resources needed to avoid severe disruptions to Government services—risking unnecessary delays for travelers by underfunding the Federal Aviation Administration; loss of access to nutritious food for pregnant and postpartum women and children by underfunding the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children; and deterioration in service for the over 71 million Americans who rely on the income support Social Security programs provide. … If the President were presented with H.R. 5525, he would veto it.That said, it’s unclear if the measure has enough Republican support to pass the House, where Democrats are unlikely to vote for it. And even if it does pass, the Democratic-led Senate is unlikely to consider it.
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Post by Webster on Sept 29, 2023 18:16:03 GMT -5
(The Guardian) White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said extreme House Republicans were “solely to blame for marching us toward a shutdown” during a briefing with reporters today. She said House speaker Kevin McCarthy’s decision to go back on the deal he made with Joe Biden will “plunge the federal government into chaos”. -- No one can explain what House Republicans are shutting down the government over. It’s a serious question and they don’t have a good answer for it.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre warned the consequences of a shutdown would be “truly hard”. House Republicans are putting the US economy and national security at risk, she said during a briefing with reporters. -- What they’re doing is incredibly irresponsible and it is reckless.
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Post by Webster on Sept 29, 2023 18:26:23 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Robert F Kennedy Jr to reportedly run as an independent for presidential nominationRobert F Kennedy Jr is reportedly set to end his challenge to Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination and run as an independent instead. According to Mediaite, Kennedy, 69 and a scion of a famous political dynasty – a son of the former US attorney general and New York senator Robert F Kennedy, a nephew of President John F Kennedy – will announce his run in Pennsylvania on 9 October. “Bobby feels that the Democratic National Committee is changing the rules to exclude his candidacy so an independent run is the only way to go,” the website quoted a “Kennedy campaign insider” as saying. Kennedy is an attorney who made his name as an environmental campaigner before achieving notoriety as a prominent vaccine skeptic, particularly over Covid-19. He has often flirted with controversy, not least in a podcast interview released this week in which he repeated a conspiracy theory about the 9/11 attacks on New York. Polling has shown Kennedy performing relatively well against Biden, the incumbent president, in the Democratic primary, but not close to posing a serious threat. However, Biden aides are reportedly nervous about the possible impact of third-party candidates in a likely presidential election match-up with Donald Trump. Polling shows widespread belief that at 80, Biden is too old to serve an effective second term in the White House. Trump is only three years younger – and faces 91 criminal charges, including for election subversion, and assorted civil threats – but polls show less concern among the public that he could be unfit to return to office. Whether Kennedy, the Green Party pick, Cornel West, or a notional nominee backed by No Labels, a supposedly centrist group, a third-party candidate is widely seen to be likely to peel more support from Biden than Trump, thereby potentially handing the presidency to the Republican. Rightwing figures (prominent among them Steve Bannon, formerly Trump’s White House strategist) have encouraged Kennedy to run against Biden or as an independent. As cited by Mediate, in July the Fox News host Greg Gutfeld said: “I think he should run as a third-party candidate because I do think he should, he would win … because his party’s radical elements, what we call the woke, have embraced this fascist clampdown on language.” On Friday, as observers digested news of Kennedy’s imminent change of course, the author Michael Weiss referred to infamous electoral sabotage carried out by Roger Stone and other Republican operatives when he said: “The ratfuckery was self-evident from day one.” But not everyone thought Kennedy’s move would be bad for Biden. Joe Conason, editor of the National Memo, said: “Go Bobby! Running ‘independent’ means you’ll draw more voters from the candidate you resemble most in political ideology, personal conduct, and narcissistic mentality. (That’s Trump, not Biden.)”
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Post by Webster on Oct 2, 2023 17:07:39 GMT -5
(The Guardian) From the Guardian’s Lauren Aratani, here’s more about Donald Trump’s civil fraud trial happening in New York City today, and why it could have major financial consequences for the ex-president and his family: Just a few miles south of Trump Tower in New York City, a judge on Monday will hear allegations of fraud within the Trump Organization in a trial that could see Donald Trump and his family business paying hundreds of millions of dollars in damages and that has already threatened to end his business career in the city where it started.
The New York attorney general, Letitia James, has accused Trump of using false and misleading financial statements from 2011 to 2021 to make himself and his businesses wealthier, helping him broker deals and obtain financing. Based on her office’s three-year investigation, James is arguing that Trump owes at least $250m for committing fraud.
During the three-year investigation, James found that Trump had exaggerated the value of 23 of his properties and assets to the tune of hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars. Trump used these financial statements to obtain favorable loans and make his net worth appear higher than it actually was. Trump said he will appear in court on Monday. “I’m going to Court tomorrow morning to fight for my name and reputation,” he said on his Truth Social account on Sunday.
Minutes ago, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign sent out an email attacking Letitia James, the New York state attorney general who sued him and his family, alleging fraud. A judge agreed with her last week, setting the stage for the trial opening today that will determine how much the Trump must pay for inflating their assets in order to secure better loan terms over a period of ten years. In typical Trump form, the email is basically a list of attack on James, including calling her a “Democratic activist” and accusing her of being “soft on crime” and preventing “New York’s police officers from doing their jobs”. James is indeed a Democrat, and if she’s been trying to frustrate the police, evidence suggests she hasn’t been very good at it.
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Post by Webster on Oct 2, 2023 17:09:09 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Today, Donald Trump is in a New York City courtroom, but yesterday, he was having what can only be described as a weird one, the Guardian’s Michael Sainato reports: Faced with a litany of criminal charges, Donald Trump on Sunday told a campaign rally in Iowa that he would prefer to die by electrocution rather than be eaten by a shark if he ever found himself on a rapidly sinking, electrically powered boat.
The former president and frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination delivered the bizarre remarks during a speech in the community of Ottuma. He was pontificating over batteries for electric powered boats while recounting a conversation he claimed to have with a boat manufacturer in South Carolina. “If I’m sitting down and that boat is going down and I’m on top of a battery and the water starts flooding in, I’m getting concerned, but then I look 10 yards to my left and there’s a shark over there, so I have a choice of electrocution and a shark, you know what I’m going to take? Electrocution,” Trump said. “I will take electrocution every single time, do we agree?”
Trump then continued criticizing the prospect of any other sustainable energy technologies and claiming he would repeal the Joe Biden White House’s electric vehicle mandate.
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Post by Webster on Oct 4, 2023 17:41:37 GMT -5
(The Guardian) Biden calls to 'change the poisonous atmosphere in Washington' after McCarthy overthrowIn a speech at the White House, Joe Biden said that despite Kevin McCarthy’s removal as speaker of the House, Democrats were willing to work with the GOP to pass spending bills and avoid a government shutdown that will otherwise occur in November. “We cannot and should not again be faced with 11th-hour decision of brinksmanship that threatens to shut down the government,” Biden said. “More than anything, we need to change the poisonous atmosphere in Washington,” he added. “You know, we have strong disagreements, but we need to stop seeing each other as enemies, need to talk to one another, listen to one another, work with one another.” Biden said he and the House’s top Democrat, Hakeem Jeffries, believe “our Republican colleagues remain committed to working in a bipartisan fashion. We were prepared to do it as well, for the good of the American people”.
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