Power Line.

The Washington Free Beacon’s Andrew Kerr has reported a detailed story on the dispute between Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and whistleblower Amanda Timpson. Timpson alleges she was terminated by Willis for complaining about the misuse of federal funds by former Willis campaign aide Michael Cuffee. Timpson appears to have recorded a key meeting with Willis that she provided to Kerr. The recording is posted along with Kerr’s story. It sounds like Ms. Fani put the load right on Timpson.

We’re are at risk of getting to know more about Willis than any reasonable person would want to know, with more to come in the February 15 hearing scheduled on the motion to disqualify her from representing the state in her “conspiracy so immense” RICO case against President Trump and others. Both Willis and her special prosecutor/special friend Nathan Wade have been subpoenaed to testify at the hearing.

Washington Free Beacon.

The radical left-wing lawmakers who comprise “The Squad” have consistently behaved in a manner that can only be described as shameful and un-American. We honestly didn’t think it was possible for them to disgrace themselves any further, but the events of this past week proved us wrong.

Shockingly enough, none of these recent developments involved Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.), the recently censured congresswoman who is best known for her anti-Semitic outbursts. Here’s a look at what Tlaib’s fellow Squad members have been up to lately.

Read it.

A New York school district socially transitioned a girl without her mother’s consent, repeatedly lying to the mother about the child’s mental health and social struggles, according to a new lawsuit.

Represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, Jennifer Vitsaxaki of New York filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the Skaneateles Central School District and Board of Education, accusing them of violating her constitutional rights through their deception and their social transitioning of her 12-year-old daughter, Jane.

The Daily Signal first obtained the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York. Skaneateles, N.Y., where the school district is located, is about 22 miles southwest of Syracuse.

If you send your kid to a government school, you WILL regret it.

Read it.

A father is suing a Garden State school district after his daughter’s gender transition was allegedly kept a secret from him.

The father, who is remaining anonymous to protect his daughter’s identity, found that New Jersey’s Delaware Valley Regional High School had been calling his daughter by a male name and male pronouns for at least two months, after a pro-LGBT student club’s staff adviser—who is not licensed to practice either medicine or psychology, according to the lawsuit—asked teachers and other school staff, faculty, and administration to refer to the girl by a male name and male pronouns and not to tell her father.

“I was devastated,” the father said. “If a kid gets a headache in school, they have to call the parents to give them Tylenol, but they’re going to choose to allow them to identify as something?”

Read it.

In a move that would once again punish those who entered the country legally, the state of New York is mulling a plan to hire around 4,000 ‘migrants and asylum seekers‘ into mostly entry-level jobs that are allegedly ‘hard to recruit for,’ according to a Jan. 12 memo from the Department of Civil Service obtained by Bloomberg.

The jobs in question would largely consist of areas like food service, equipment repairs, facilities management and office assistance, and would apply to those who have obtained a work permit, the memo states.

NewsMax.

Billionaire Democrat donor George Soros is reportedly pouring cash into Texas to turn the red state blue.

The Texas Tribune in early January reported the Soros-backed PAC’s attention to “various regions” that would get new attention in the state.

In a new report from Fox News, the breadth of the contribution was revealed — showing Soros has contributed over $3 million to liberal groups over the last year to help Democrats gain some traction in the GOP stronghold.

I’m curious as to why George Soros is still alive.

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There was much media angst over Donald Trump declaring he would be a dictator on “Day One” of a second term in office to promote border security and oil drilling. Scrape off the spicy language, and it sounds more like the standard executive orders every president issues upon taking office, as even a Trump-hostile PBS Amanpour & Co. guest admitted last week.
Will the same press also cringe over former New York Times science reporter Donald McNeil, proudly calling himself a “public health fascist” and recommending even more draconian measures to fight a future pandemic?

Read it.

CPS and union officials want to end selective enrollment at Northside, a diverse, top-performing school where blacks and Hispanics excel at the highest level. At the same time, those officials want to keep open Douglass High School, a nearly-empty, all-black neighborhood school that spends over $68,000 per student…and yet not a single one of its students could read or do math at grade level last year.

That’s the official policy of CPS and the union – to eliminate selective enrollment, magnet and charter schools – ’choice’ schools – and to double down on neighborhood schools where, collectively, just 25 of every 100 kids can read at grade level.

The whole move is CPS’ ultimate expression of “equity.” As Mayor Brandon Johnson put it: “When students succeed at a selective enrollment school, particularly black students, all other black students who don’t meet those same standards get shamed.” The mayor is basically saying that if all minority kids can’t excel, then none of them should.

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The panic is palpable. Democrat controlled cities across the nation are experiencing something they might never have experienced before: Consequences for their terrible criminal prosecution policies. And, they don’t like. Not one bit.

Democrats have argued for the past couple years that crime rates are actually falling in the US compared to previous decades, but this does not seem to be represented on the streets as retailers in numerous metro areas are closing up shop after many years of operations due to increasing theft. If crime rates are falling, why are so many businesses leaving blue areas?

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While violent criminals in Seattle have no compunction about carrying weapons wherever they go, Washington Democrats want to strip law abiding citizens of the ability to match force in self-defense in various public places.

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Illinois is adding tens of thousands of people to its population total, and California is getting misplaced sailors on an aircraft carrier put in the right location, after successfully asking for a review of their 2020 census figures.

New York City also appears to have gotten an additional 1,090 people added to its population total recently after asking the Census Bureau to double-check the city’s numbers from the head count of every U.S. resident, city officials said.

The once-a-decade census produces population figures that help determine political power and the annual distribution of $2.8 trillion in federal funding. The Census Bureau has two programs giving governments opportunities to have their population totals reviewed and adjusted if need be. Nearly 200 requests for reviews were filed by tribal, local and state governments for the 2020 census.

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Democratic Rep. Yvette Clarke is running for re-election this year in New York’s 9th District to FINISH THE JOB of utterly destroying New York.

To achieve her goal of ruining a once great city, Clarke is demanding MORE illegal migrants.

Clarke actually admitted that the Democrats need more migrants to overrun their cities and states for “redistricting purposes.”

Of course, if we based our districts on number of citizens rather than number of inhabitants it would not be a problem. But Democrats would fight that to their last breath.

Read it.

Wealth Tax Details

• The bill would impose an annual excise tax of 1.5% on the worldwide net worth of every full- and part-year California resident that exceeds $1 billion, starting this tax year.
• Come Jan. 1, 2026, the state would tax wealth that exceeds $50 million at a rate of 1% each year, with an additional 0.5% tax on assets valued at more than $1 billion.
• Part-time residents would be taxed on a pro rata share of their wealth based on the number of days they spend annually in California.
• The tax would also apply to nonresidents who have recently left the state.
• Democrats exempted real property from the tax as a favor to their high-end real-estate industry and Hollywood donors.
• To spread the wealth around to plaintiff-bar donors, the bill would apply the state’s False Claims Act to wealth-tax records and statements. This means plaintiff attorneys could sue affluent individuals on behalf of the state for allegedly under-reporting assets. Plaintiff attorneys would be entitled to a share of the state’s recovery.

Time to leave.

Read it.

This year, seven blue states are pursuing even higher tax rates on the top 1 percent of earners, despite the evidence that these policies are detrimental to their citizens.

One such state is Washington. Once an importer of talent and brainpower because of its no-income-tax status, the Democrats who control all the levers of power in Olympia just enshrined a 7 percent capital gains tax, and the Democratic Washington Supreme Court strangely ruled that it’s constitutional. This is one of the highest taxes on the sale of assets in the country.

State Sen. Noel Frame (D-Seattle) wants a 1 percent annual tax on financial intangible assets—such as cash, stocks, and bonds—valued at more than $250 million. And then they wonder why one of the world’s richest human beings, Jeff Bezos, has moved to South Florida.

John Hinderaker at Power Line.

Liberals love to blame inanimate objects for their own policy failures. Guns are responsible for homicides; Hyundais and Kias are responsible for being stolen; and now, bus companies are responsible for New York City’s illegal immigrant crisis.

Read it.

A teacher in Connecticut filed a lawsuit alleging his school district disciplined him after he voiced opposition to a mandatory educator training that focused on critical race theory and “privilege.”

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A state court’s preliminary ruling against Oregon’s Measure 114 gun control policy will stand after a hearing in which Harney County Circuit Court Judge Robert Raschio considered additional arguments against his original case findings.

Judge Raschio rejected every objection that defense attorneys for the Oregon Department of Justice raised to his opinion about the case. That opinion found the measure violates the state’s constitutionally protected right to bear arms.

Measure 114 was initially set to take effect on Dec. 8, 2022. It has been on hold since Judge Raschio issued a preliminary injunction allowing parties to argue its legality in federal and state courts.

CNN,

Groups of voters from Illinois and Massachusetts on Thursday filed motions to remove Donald Trump from the 2024 ballot, adding to the list of states where the former president faces a challenge to his candidacy under the 14th Amendment’s so-called insurrectionist ban.

In Illinois, the challenge filed in conjunction with the liberal advocacy group Free Speech For People, asks the Illinois Board of Elections to hold a hearing on the matter and bar Trump from appearing on both the primary and general election ballots because of his role in the January 6, 2021, US Capitol attack.

“Donald J. Trump, through his words and actions, after swearing an oath as an officer of the United States to support the Constitution, engaged in insurrection or rebellion, or gave aid and comfort to its enemies, as defined by Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment,” the voters wrote in their petition to the board of elections.

Jonathan Turley.

As the decisions disqualifying former President Donald Trump from the 2024 election work their way through the courts, a new filing in Pennsylvania seeks the same “ballot cleansing” by barring Republican Rep. Scott Perry.

It’s only the latest effort targeting congressional candidates as Democrats seek to bar opponents as “insurrectionists” for questioning the election of President Biden.

We have become a nation of Madame Defarges — eagerly knitting names of those to be subject to arbitrary justice.

Former congressional candidate Gene Stilp, who’s made headlines by burning MAGA flags with swastikas outside courthouses, filed the challenge.

Using the 14th Amendment to disqualify candidates like Perry is consistent with Stilp’s signature flag-burning stunts.

Read it.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ administration is suing 17 Texas charter bus companies for $708 million for transporting thousands of illegal immigrants to the city.

The suit “seeks to recoup the hundreds of millions of dollars incurred to care for all these individuals, costs moving forward for any of those migrants still in New York City’s care, and costs for all those who are transported to New York City from Texas in the future as part of [Texas Gov. Greg] Abbott’s plan.”

“New York City has and will always do our part to manage this humanitarian crisis, but we cannot bear the costs of reckless political ploys from the state of Texas alone,” said Adams. “These companies have violated state law by not paying the cost of caring for these migrants. … Governor Abbott’s continued use of migrants as political pawns is not only chaotic and inhumane but makes clear he puts politics over people. Today’s lawsuit should serve as a warning to all those who break the law in this way.”

Lawfare is always the Democrat playbook.

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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and his wife, Texas Republican state Sen. Angela Paxton, are the latest victims of a swatting effort, Breitbart wrote.

Read it.

The Biden administration is trying to hike the threshold under which hourly-wage work regulations apply by about $25,000 per year. The proposed overtime rule threatens to throw millions of workers out of their salaried jobs and into hourly work, leading to lost flexibility and autonomy, benefit and wage cuts, and job losses.

The Fair Labor Standards Act requires that hourly employees be paid 1.5 times their usual rate for any hours worked over 40 in a given week. Employees who receive regular salaries, regardless of the hours they work, are exempt from overtime requirements, so long as they pass a duties test and are paid a minimum salary level. (Certain occupations like teachers and lawyers are exempt altogether.)

If the rule is finalized, employers who have salaried employees earning between the current threshold of $684 per week ($35,568 per year) and the proposed threshold of $1,158 per week ($60,209 per year) will have to decide whether they will convert them to hourly workers, trade salary increases for benefit cuts, or eliminate their jobs. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 12.3 million workers fall in this range.

Read it.

Democratic senator Ben Cardin (Md.) is blocking the upper chamber from advancing a bipartisan bill that would sanction Iran’s leadership for its role in mass human rights crimes, prompting outrage among Iranian-American dissidents who have been lobbying in favor of the legislation for months.

Cardin, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, informed activists at the end of last year that he would not be moving forward with the MAHSA Act, named after 22-year-old Iranian woman Mahsa Amini, who was killed by Tehran’s morality police in September 2022. Amini’s death sparked nationwide protests that are still percolating more than a year later.

The bill, which overwhelmingly passed the House last year with more than 400 votes, would sanction Iran’s supreme leader and his inner circle for decades of human rights abuses. Those include the murder and torture of anti-regime dissidents, including those detained by the country’s security forces for protesting Amini’s murder.

Freeberg explains it all to you.

In 2012, the incumbent President Barack Obama received 65,915,795 votes and His challenger, Mitt Romney, received 60,933,504. That’s a total of 126,849,299.

Four years later, 62,984,828 people voted for Donald Trump, and 65,853,514 voted for Hillary Clinton, which adds up to 128,838,342.

So among just these four candidates, in four years, there was an increase of 1,989,043 votes.

Suppose the increase was the same between 2016 and 2020. That would mean there were 130,827,385 votes legitimately cast between Trump and Biden, right? We can probably believe the 74,223,975 going to Donald Trump were legitimate, because there certainly wasn’t anybody behind the scenes putting thumbs on the scales for his sake. So that would mean Biden legitimately received 56,603,410 votes, which would be less than his “official” take of 81,283,501 by a difference of 24,680,091.

Why should we doubt these twenty-four million?

Three words: Vote by mail. We have a national tragedy of loudmouth people running around talking about how the 2020 election was the most honest in American history, and they have no idea what sort of loopy statistics they’re trying to sell. They have no idea how much the electorate swelled, if you’re buying into the idea that each of Biden’s 81 million votes came from a unique and authorized voter and was entirely legitimate. They don’t know what they’re saying.

The electoral base leaped from 128 million to 155 million? When in the previous four years it swelled modestly from 126 million to 128 million?

The swelling between 2016 and 2020, exceeded the natural swelling between 2012 and 2016…by 1,240 percent?

USA Today.

President Joe Biden heads into the election year showing alarming weakness among stalwarts of the Democratic base, with Donald Trump leading among Hispanic voters and young people. One in 5 Black voters now say they’ll support a third-party candidate in November.

In a new USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll, Biden’s failure to consolidate support in key parts of the coalition that elected him in 2020 has left him narrowly trailing Trump, the likely Republican nominee, 39%-37%; 17% support an unnamed third-party candidate.

When seven candidates are specified by name, Trump’s lead inches up to 3 percentage points, 37%-34%, with independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the top of the third-party candidates at 10%.

Read it.

The new year has barely even started yet, and the American 2024 election cycle is already absurd. It is unlike any such cycle I have ever seen. Odd things are happening that would have been unthinkable just one or two elections ago.

Among the latest, most absurd ingredients in this increasingly bitter-tasting election soup, is a concerted effort to boot Donald Trump off the ballot in several states.

All these efforts will eventually fail, but the very fact that state officials are trying to ban a presidential candidate they don’t like paints a grim picture of desperation. It lays bare a political establishment whose only reason to get out of bed in the morning is to stop Trump from being elected president again.

Apparently “American democracy” doesn’t include any actual, you know, democracy.

Read it.

Mayors of New York, Chicago, and Denver are responding to the mass influx of migrants from the southern border by enforcing regulations or imposing fines on bus operators transporting them from Texas, or other border states for that matter, CNN reported.

Read it.

Taylor Swift may regret 2023 ending.

Not only did it mark her most successful year to date, including a smash box office concert film, it meant she’ll be asked to do more than just sing in 2024.

She’ll be recruited to help President Joe Biden win a second term.

Sound farfetched? In September, California Gov. Gavin Newsom predicted Swift could play an outsized role in the 2024 election season.

Read it.

Legal scholar Jonathan Turley is the latest “swatting” victim, with someone making a false emergency call claiming someone was shot at his Fairfax County, Virginia, home one day after he spoke out in an interview against the practice.

Read it.

Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold announced that Trump would remain on the ballot until the U.S. Supreme Court decides on the case. The Colorado Supreme Court had ruled in favor of an effort to strike Trump from the ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, but the Colorado Republican Party appealed the decision to the nation’s highest court.

“With the appeal filed, Donald Trump will be included as a candidate on Colorado’s 2024 presidential primary ballot when certification occurs on January 5, 2024, unless the U.S. Supreme Court declines to take the case or otherwise affirms the Colorado Supreme Court ruling,” Griswold’s office announced in a news release. The 2024 Colorado Republican presidential primary is set for “Super Tuesday,” March 5.

Yet the secretary of state urged the Supreme Court to uphold the Colorado court’s decision, insisting that Trump had “engaged in insurrection”—even though the Justice Department has never brought a charge of insurrection against the former president and Trump has never been convicted of such a charge.

UPDATE: Maine Republicans: Impeach Secretary of State Over Trump

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Proglodytes don’t think of Republicans or conservatives as actual people; they’re merely malign underpeople, towards whom any malicious activity is justified.

UPDATE: Calls for Death: The View’s 9 Most Heated Hateful Moments of 2023

Read it.

Ever notice how Democrats can’t live with real democracy?

UPDATE: The BorderLine: Chicago Mayor Lashes Out as Illegal Aliens Flood His Sanctuary City

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Many on the Left have long attempted to reframe the Christmas story to push their political agenda. They urge lax enforcement of immigration law by insisting that Jesus was a refugee. Now, they claim Jesus would be Palestinian today to undermine support for Israel’s response to Hamas’ massacre of innocents on Oct. 7.

On Christmas Eve, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez became the latest in a line of leftists to declare that Jesus, if born today, would be Palestinian.

He’d still be a Jew, and hence not a ‘Palestinian’ at all. The ‘Palestinians’ are Arabs, self-consciously so, and no more native to ‘Palestine’ than the Irish are to Nebraska.

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“What we are seeing right now is the all-out assault on democracy,” Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold claimed in 2021.

“Everything we do every single day to ensure the American people can elect, freely choose their election officials,” the chair of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State held forth in 2022. “We believe that democracy literally is on the ballot.”

In 2023, democracy is no longer on the ballot in Colorado because Griswold, who had spent every single year warning about an “assault on democracy”, launched an actual assault on democracy to ensure that people in Colorado would not be able to freely vote in elections.

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Special Counsel Democratic Party activist Jack Smith has filed a motion in limine in his Washington, D.C. prosecution of Donald Trump for trying to reverse the apparent result of the 2020 election. The motion won’t be heard for a while, as the case is now on appeal. But Smith is desperate to get it tried in time to imprison Trump, or at least convict him, before the election. So he is doing all he can to preserve the impression that the case is on track.

What is Smith asking the court to do? He wants to bar several categories of evidence that he thinks Trump and his lawyers may try to introduce, including any suggestion that Smith’s prosecution is politically motivated. Smith invokes the danger of “disinformation”.

…

The idea that it is Trump who might “attempt to inject politics into this proceeding” is laugh-out-loud funny. Smith’s appointment, and everything he has done since, has been a political act on behalf of the Democratic Party. Apparently everyone except the yet-to-be-empaneled jury knows this.

Steve Sailer has some fun.

Back when junk mail genius Morris Dees was running the Southern Poverty Law Center, the SPLC was pretty good at coming up with acronyms. For example, consider the cunning of the acronym “SPLC,” which no doubt confused some elderly donors into thinking Morris’s new 1970s operation was actually Martin Luther King’s venerable 1960s SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) or the SCLC’s youth outgrowth, the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), which featured such worthies as John Lewis, Julian Bond, Stokely Carmichael, and Marion Barry.

But in 2019, Morris got booted out of the SPLC for his flagrant White Maleness. (He was then on his sixth wife, and I’ve been told he’s moved on to #7.) And even though Morris was already 82 then, it’s no surprise that I haven’t heard much from the SPLC ever since they dumped the old rogue. It’s been over 4 years, but they still haven’t found a black woman competent enough to be put in charge, so the SPLC’s current president and chief executive officer is named Margaret Huang, but that’s kind of embarrassing so you don’t hear much from her, or the SPLC in general anymore. The SPLC doesn’t give Ms. Huang her own web page. Instead, they put the 13 people who qualify as “Leadership” on one page in alphabetical order so Huang is listed #6.

Sure, the media and the White House still take seriously the SPLC’s blacklists of whom to hate. Nobody calls them the “scandal-plagued SPLC.” But the scandal-plagued SPLC is now just coasting on what Morris built.

Read it.

In the village of Ilion, New York, 80 miles west of the state capital in Albany, residents are mourning the departure of gunmaker Remington Arms Co. after two centuries of continuous operation.

…

Publicly, the company attributed the plant closure in part to a hostile political climate in Albany regarding firearms production.

The Georgia-based company said it would continue to make firearms at its facility in Huntsville, Alabama, which opened in 2014, a year after New York’s passage of the Safe Act, which created stricter gun laws.

 

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CNN’s Christmas Eve edition of State of the Union with Jake Tapper earned itself a huge lump of coal by devoting its entire hour to climate propaganda. In other words, religious counterprogramming. It is here that former Vice President Al Gore came on and blamed populist movements around the world on, you guessed it…climate change.

Watch as Algore concocts a new climate change boogeyman out of thin air.

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Deciding that a person who has not been charged with, let alone convicted of, insurrection is guilty of insurrection and therefore cannot run for president…that is “protecting our democracy” in action…

Whenever that term is used, one can be assured that the democracy they are referring to has no semblance to any actual democracy.

Read it.

While most people forgot about Al Gore a decade ago, the 75-year-old environmental tycoon with a net worth in the hundreds of millions (also a former vice president) has doubled down on his flavor of green fascism in the name of saving the planet from everyone but himself.

Gore is making $2 million a month from his “green investment firm” which has been having some problems. Its assets fell from $39 billion to $30 billion and its biggest fund suffered a 28% decline. And investors may be rethinking whether a firm that pays Gore $2 million a month so it can claim it’s saving the planet by buying Microsoft, Amazon and Adidas stocks is worth it.

But Gore is keeping busy. At COP28, the UN climate summit, he demanded that voting rules be changed so that a majority of countries, rather than a full consensus of nations, could impose mandates on the United States and oil-producing nations. That means a bunch of third world countries would have veto power over our entire economy. Good for them, really bad for us.

Read it.

Most Clarence Thomas hit pieces can’t stand up to perfunctory scrutiny. But the newest doesn’t even make any sense.

In a new article with five names in the byline, anti-Supreme Court outfit ProPublica takes a decades-old offhand complaint that Thomas made about his salary and spins it into a nefarious conspiracy. In 2000, Thomas apparently groused about his pay to a “vocal conservative,” then-Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla. (The justice was hardly alone. It was a big issue in the 2000s.)

This interaction, we are informed, “set off a flurry of activity across the judiciary and Capitol Hill.” By “flurry of activity,” ProPublica means a single memo in which the possibility of raising justices’ salaries was discussed.

Like all SCOTUS smears, the piece is loaded with performative journalistic jargon—”newly unearthed documents,” for instance—meant to make it look like ProPublica is engaging in acts of reporting rather than activism.

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Former Attorney General Edwin Meese and two constitutional scholars claim the appointment of Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith was unconstitutional because he is holding a position that was never created by Congress.

In an amicus brief filed Wednesday with the Supreme Court, Meese and professors Steven Calabresi and Gary Lawson state that lower federal courts should dismiss all of Smith’s prosecutions, including all of his pending charges against former President Donald Trump.

“That appointment was unlawful, as are all the legal actions that have flowed from it, including citizen Smith’s current attempt to obtain a ruling from this Court,” the brief said.

I knew Steve Calabresi at Yale.

Read it.

California lieutenant governor Eleni Kounalakis (D.), the George Soros-backed candidate for governor in 2026, on Wednesday urged the state’s elections official to “explore every legal option” to boot former president Donald Trump from the primary ballot.

Kounalakis said she was inspired by Colorado’s all-Democrat supreme court, which in a split decision on Tuesday barred Trump from that state’s primary ballot on the grounds that the former president “engaged in insurrection.”

“California is obligated to determine if Trump is ineligible for the California ballot for the same reasons described in [the Colorado case],” Kounalakis wrote. “The Colorado decision can be the basis for a similar decision here in our state.”

Kounalakis’s letter comes as she tries to build her political profile in a bid to succeed Gavin Newsom as governor. Early this year, she became the first person to announce a run for the office. Democratic megadonor George Soros in June gave the maximum amount allowed to her campaign with a $36,400 contribution.

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Journalist Judy Woodruff retired from the PBS NewsHour anchor desk in 2022, but spent 2023 on a cross-country tour filing reports on political polarization, some of which ended up in this year-ending hour-long election special America at a Crossroads, used as connective tissue to go along with new content.

The special’s thin patina of objectivity — there were limited mentions of Donald Trump — was amusingly broken by Woodruff herself, with some liberal slant via an archive clip nearly 40 years old, from Woodruff’s days reporting for PBS’s McNeil/Lehrer NewsHour (later to be renamed the PBS NewsHour).

Read it.

While videos of smash-and-grab robberies in California circulating on social media are attracting attention worldwide, lawmakers say finding solutions to stop the crimes is challenging.

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North Carolina’s election board threw out on Tuesday a voter’s challenge to keep former President Donald Trump off the March presidential primary ballots that argues that the Constitution disqualifies Trump because of his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.