Read it.

Elbridge Gerry, for whom this trick was named, was a Democratic-Republican, which eventually became today’s Democrat party. The roots of corruption reach deep.

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The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development will engage in voter registration efforts that in some cases allow mass collection of voter registration forms by public housing officials, raising concerns about the potential for voter fraud among other legal issues.

HUD’s voter registration drive comes as part of the “all-of-government” approach described in an executive order from President Joe Biden.

The Democrats invented the urban political machine. Why not stick with what works?

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Three vulnerable Senate Democrats have received substantial campaign help from a prominent donor and a liberal lawyer linked to some of the biggest political disinformation scandals in recent years.

Steven Hayward at Power Line.

Administration and the Biden Clown Show that go beyond inflation, energy market disruptions, foreign policy cluelessness, and other totems of the dismal 1970s.

Carter, we tend to forget today, was the Democratic establishment’s necessary and acceptable choice to outflank George Wallace, who had a real shot of winning the Democratic nomination in 1976. In 2020, it was the credible threat that Bernie Sanders might win the Democratic nomination that sent the Democratic establishment to rally behind Slow Joe Biden to stop Sanders. One thing Carter and Biden have in common is that both largely sold out to the left wing of the party, despite prior reputation as “moderates.”

But even Carter started getting a clue by the fourth year of his presidency, increasing defense spending in the face of a growing Soviet threat, installing Paul Volcker to fight inflation seriously, and beginning, however haltingly, to de-regulate domestic energy production. Biden shows no sign of progress on the easiest of learning curves.

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Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus, a reliable barometer of certified liberal opinion inside the Beltway, has a column up about the matter of Dianne Feinstein, which even a careless reader can make out as another loud note in chorus of coordinated voices that has determined that Feinstein needs to be forced from office.

The article breaks no new ground in terms of news value or reporting, as with one small exception it simply recycles the details of the San Francisco Chronicle story.

I wish I had a job like that.

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I have been writing for years about how progressive policies championed by the Democratic Party and served up under the guise of caring about low-income Americans wind up hurting these very communities.

The latest chapter in this saga is the newly unleashed round of inflation, the worst our country has seen in 40 years.

Two important points here are that first, we can lay responsibility for this inflation directly at the doorstep of the Biden administration, and second, those being hurt most by this inflation are the very low-income Americans that this administration claims to care so much about.

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Democrats love to propose wealth taxes.

California Democrats have done it, congressional Democrats have done it many times, and now it looks as though President Joe Biden wants to get in on the game. If only they’d pause for a moment to consider—or care—whether wealth taxes are constitutional.

Biden’s proposed wealth tax, styled as a minimum income tax on households worth more than $100 million, will claim least 20% of both income and “unrealized capital gains.” If that phrase sounds familiar, that’s because taxing whatever those are was the key feature of congressional Democrats’ short-lived proposal last year.

Unrealized capital gains don’t exist. You can no more tax them directly, as congressional Democrats tried to do, than reclassify them as “income,” as Biden wants to do.

A capital gain is the profit you get when you sell an investment for more than you paid for it. When the sale is complete and the money in your hand, a tax lawyer would call it a “realized” capital gain.

If, on the other hand, you choose not to sell an investment that has increased in value since you bought it, your capital gain is “unrealized,” which means it exists only on paper. That’s because its value could just as easily go down tomorrow, and the only way to lock in, or realize, that gain is by selling the investment.

The congressional Democrats’ proposal would have taxed those gains even though they didn’t exist. That, as I’ve written previously, is likely unconstitutional.

Democrats love to tax people, not on what they have, but on what Democrats think they have. “Billionaires” don’t have shit until they sell the stuff the estimated value of which excites the envy of the greedy. Jeff Bezos is considered a billionaire because he owns a lot of stock in Amazon; such estimates are based on taking the recent price of a share of Amazon stock and multiplying it by his stock holdings. Of course, anyone who knows elementary economics knows that you won’t get that price for all of those shares. But Democrats daily demonstrate that they know nothing about economics. They see the world as just chock-full of piles of cash that they would just love to steal and spend.

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Are you starting to notice a pattern by now? For the past six years, the American people have been emotionally manipulated by what I call “manufactured waves of outrage”. Once the corporate media identifies a trigger, it will obsessively focus on it for weeks or months on end, and the narrative that develops will be echoed and magnified by millions upon millions of social media denizens. Before too long, much of the population is whipped up into an irrational emotional frenzy, and that frenzy is used to move certain agendas forward.

Read it.

Higher energy prices worrying you? Be afraid because Congress is coming to the rescue. Legislators are introducing a new bill called the “Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act.” The bill’s objective is to reduce the price of oil. The bill pans to tax the windfall profits of large energy companies at a 50% rate. They define windfall profits as profits above and beyond those in the year before Covid. The proceeds from the tax would be returned to consumers earning less than $75k through direct payments.

If Congresses goal is to inflate oil prices further and generate more inflation in the process, the bill, as currently written, is right on track. This article walks through the proposed legislation to better understand why it is grossly flawed. As we will discuss, the bill will not only generate higher prices at the gas pump, but the premise behind the bill, windfall oil profits, is dubious.

But first, it is worth looking beyond Russia’s effect on energy prices and reviewing another reason oil prices have been rising.

‘Windfall profits” is the term Democrats use when they want to pick somebody’s pockets.

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In the segment, CNN’s Anderson Cooper describes Buttigieg (without evidence) as a “very skilled politician” who became “the first openly gay cabinet secretary to be confirmed by Congress.” The latter phrase is deliberately worded to elide the fact that Richard Grenell, a Republican, was the first openly gay cabinet member in U.S. history. Grenell served as acting director of national intelligence under President Donald Trump and was also confirmed by Congress in 2018 for the role of U.S. ambassador to Germany.

While Cooper’s description is technically accurate thanks to the word “secretary,” the 60 Minutes Twitter account wrote that Buttigieg is “the first openly gay Cabinet member to be confirmed by Congress,” which is not correct. Journalists and other Democrats are in the habit of ignoring “historic” Republican political figures because, in their view, only Democrats are allowed to “make history.”

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Federal authorities are investigating three Democratic megadonors who made an enormous bet on shares of Activision Blizzard just days before Microsoft agreed in January to acquire the video game company for $69 billion.

The U.S. Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission are both looking into the suspiciously timed trading activity of Barry Diller, owner of the Daily Beast, his stepson Alex von Fürstenberg, and his friend David Geffen, a longtime Democratic donor who gave $500,000 to the scandal-plagued Lincoln Project in 2020.

Prediction: Nobody gets fired, nobody goes to jail.

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A majority of Democrats would abandon their country in the face of Russian aggression, according to a Quinnipiac poll published on Monday. By contrast, most Republicans and independents—a majority of American adults—would stand their ground and fight for freedom.

Not really news, but a useful reminder.

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Democratic leadership in the House is shutting down an investigation into illegal use of taxpayer funds by Rep. Val Demings (D., Fla.), who was caught abusing mailing privileges as she runs in a high-profile statewide race.

The Washington Free Beacon has learned that the bipartisan House Communications Standards Commission last month opened an investigation into Demings following a complaint that she sent a 12-page, campaign-style mailer to Floridians outside her district. The Democratic chairwoman of the commission, Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (Pa.), told her Republican colleagues in a letter obtained by the Free Beacon that she does “not believe that further inquiry is warranted” and on Tuesday will vote against investigating the matter further. Her vote against further action will effectively end the investigation.

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They’re not as stupid as black people, so they must be oppressors like white people.

“White-adjacent” is the new Hitler.

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Anti-Semite Rashida Tlaib will target admin’s failures to deliver policies on far left’s wish list.

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What Strassel also notes is that the Durham revelations that the Clinton Campaign was spying on candidate Trump and then, later, President Trump, have been ignored by the liberal media.

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Billionaires that majority of Democrats approve of: an entertainment celebrity, founder of the company that was found to engage in anticompetitive practices, and trader of private information. The only one they dislike more than Republicans is the one investing in green solutions

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In 2020, we saw more lawsuits filed over election laws and rule changes than in any prior year of American history. And with the congressional midterms fast approaching, litigation and other developments just keep coming.

Democrats, having successfully stolen the last Presidential election, say to themselves ‘Hey, that was easy’ and are eager to try it again.

Scott Johnson at Power Line.

Andrew Luger is President Biden’s nominee for United States Attorney for the District of Minnesota. Luger’s nomination is pending in the Senate, but Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has placed a hold on it until Luger responds to critical questions raised by the responsibility of the Minnesota office of the U.S. Attorney for the sentencing memo recommending leniency for Montez Terriel Lee’s arson/murder committed in the course of the George Floyd riots of 2020. I have embedded McConnell’s February 8 letter to Luger at the bottom of this post.

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A new study of how criminals vote found that most convicts register Democratic, a key reason in why liberal lawmakers and governors are eager for them to get back into the voting booth after their release.

“Democrats would benefit from additional ex-felon participation,” said the authoritative study in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

The authors, professors from the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University, found that in some states, felons register Democratic by more than six-to-one. In New York, for example, 61.5 percent of convicts are Democrats, just 9 percent Republican. They also cited a study that found 73 percent of convicts who turn out for presidential elections would vote Democrat.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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The scandal enveloping congresswoman Marie Newman—who is accused of signing and then reneging on a contract to pay a political rival not to run against her—has taken a shocking new turn. Federal campaign records show that after striking a secret settlement with the rival, the Illinois Democrat did, in fact, put the man on her campaign payroll.

In October 2018, Newman allegedly signed a contract with Iymen Chehade promising him a cozy six-figure salary on her congressional staff in exchange for his political support, according to the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE). When Newman ultimately didn’t hire Chehade after she won her 2020 election, he sued.

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Democratic Iowa congresswoman Cindy Axne demanded that the rich pay their “fair share” in taxes just two days after reports broke that her New York colleague Hakeem Jeffries (D.) dodged thousands of dollars in property taxes by taking advantage of a subsidy for which he voted.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

“We have a tax system that’s letting too many people off the hook that should be paying, the wealthiest among us,” Axne said during a campaign event. “It’s not fair that folks in this room, that average everyday Iowans, are paying their fair share for those wealthy folks to use everything that we have, and take advantage of it, and not pay their taxes.”

“The rich need to pay their fair share,” Axne said.

What, exactly, is ‘their fair share’? They ever say. You can’t even get them to talk about it.

How about we demand that Democrats pay their fair share? After all, they’re the ones spending money as if there were no tomorrow.

Read it.

Chelsea Clinton wants to talk about grifting. That’s just great.

The fruit, apparently, doesn’t fall that far from the global elitist narrative tree.

Perhaps looking to ride the coattails of those ganging up on “controversial anti-vaxx misinformation” (read: any uttered thought not handed down by Dr. Anthony Fauci from the heavens above) or perhaps looking to drum up support by her Twitter sycophants, Chelsea Clinton took to her Twitter account last week to lash out at Substack for providing a platform for free speech and for people to voluntarily subscribe to newsletters they’re interested in and willing to pay for.

Wow, sounds nefarious, Chelsea! Glad you stepped in.

Read it.

4,901 more people were murdered last year than in 2019. The 30% increase in murders during the year of Black Lives Matter and criminal justice reform was catastrophic. And it’s not over.

Steven Hayward at Power Line.

When Democrats aren’t trying to keep children out of school and (not) learning online, or requiring them to wear masks when they’re (not) learning in crappy union-run public schools, they’re trying to warehouse them in government-run universal child care programs.

Universal child care is one of the centerpieces of the Democrats’ BBB Bill (better known as “Biden’s Big Blunder”). Yet the people who scream “follow the science” never seem to take in what several social science studies of early preschool have found.

Read it.

In September 2020, Democratic Senators were unified: No President should nominate a Supreme Court Justice during an election year. With the retirement of Justice Stephen Breyer, they now face a similar dilemma. Let’s see their positions just 16 months ago.

The fun part is watching then dance around trying to argue that That Was Then This Is Now.

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Just one day after President Joe Biden nominated Gigi Sohn to the federal agency that oversees television networks, her nonprofit secured a favorable legal settlement with those same networks that reduced her financial liability by more than $30 million.

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In a June run-off election, Compton City Council member Isaac Galvan, was reelected to the seat representing District 2, beating fellow Democrat Andre Spicer by 855 votes to 854 in the nonpartisan contest.

In August, prosecutors charged Galvan, 34, with election fraud and bribery.

Democrats cheat. They can’t helpit. Then even cheat each other.

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President Joe Biden joined Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and numerous other Democrats this week in a partisan attempt to preemptively delegitimize the 2022 election.

Twice, the president was asked by reporters whether voters could trust the electoral system, and twice, the president contended that a fair election was unlikely unless the Senate was blown up and the Democrats’ election power grab was passed—a maneuver that poses a far more serious and lasting threat to the constitutional order than anything Donald Trump is cooking up right now.

“I think it would easily be illegitimate,” said Biden. “The increase in the prospect of being illegitimate is in proportion to not being able to get these reforms passed.”

Vice President Kamala Harris, sent out on the morning shows Thursday, offered basically the same position.

Read it.

Covid may be mutating into a kinder, gentler form, but there is nothing kind or gentle about the measures that Democrats are prepared to impose on those who disagree with them. Rasmussen finds these shocking numbers:

* 59% of Democrats favor legislation that would confine all unvaccinated people in their homes, except in case of emergency.

* 48% of Democrats think the government should fine or imprison individuals “who publicly question the efficacy of the existing COVID-19 vaccines on social media, television, radio, or in online or digital publications.”

* 45% of Democrats would favor requiring unvaccinated citizens to temporarily live in designated facilities or locations.

* 47% of Democrats favor a government program using digital devices to track unvaccinated people to ensure that they are quarantined or socially distancing from others.

It is hard to say which of these measures is most outrageous. Confining people to their homes; tracking them digitally to make sure they do not interact with others; being moved to temporary camps if they are unvaccinated–all of these proposals can fairly be described as fascist, and all are supported by either a majority or near-majority of Democrats.

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Hey, you know how some people refer to public schools as “government schools” and say that their mission isn’t really education, but social indoctrination and enforcing social conformity? And how other people say, “That’s kook talk. Get away from me, you kook! With your crazy kook talk.” Well, the Democrat Party of Michigan has firmly weighed in on the side of the kooks.

Read it.

At a speech in Georgia yesterday, President Biden charged all U.S. Senators with deciding “where they stand, not just for the moment, but for the ages.” The Senate filibuster, which Biden defended passionately in 2005 and again last year, is now apparently a neo-segregationist atrocity because it stands in the way of the president’s legislative agenda.

Biden wants federal power to veto election laws in certain states, because he is on the right side of history. Of course this means if you oppose him, you are on the wrong side. “At consequential moments in history, they present a choice,” he said. “Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?”

Dr King was a Republican; George Wallace was a Democrat while he was a segregationist, then switched parties when he changed his outlook. John Lewis and Bull Connor were both Democrats Abraham Lincoln was a Republican; Jefferson Davis was a Democrat. Looks like the Republicans are willling the Right Side of History sweepstakes here.

George Wallace, an actual segregationist, is like the filibuster: Biden used to like him. Now, not so much. In 1987 the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Biden “bragged of an award he received from George Wallace in 1973.” In 1975, then-Senator Biden added: I think the Democratic Party could stand a liberal George Wallace—someone who’s not afraid to stand up and offend people.”

Here we have a president who constantly needs to distance himself from views and relationships which have come to seem morally toxic in the span of just one lifetime. You would think that experience might make him more circumspect about declaring what future generations will think of today’s political debates. Not so.

Being On The Right Side of History has been a progressive thing forever. Yet they never seem to get it right.

Scott Johnson at Power Line.

Everything about the speech is a lie, right down to the title. He worked in a fraudulent reference to Abraham Lincoln for good measure.

That pretty much sums up The Biden Experience.

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What does it mean when President Biden declares an event in which four people died, all of them Trump supporters and only one by violence, the “worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War,” and The New York Times marks the anniversary by proclaiming that “Every Day Is Jan. 6 Now”? The implication is politics as permanent crisis, which sounds strikingly like a definition of war.

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Chicago police have confirmed that a high-end Burberry store on the city’s central Michigan Ave. was robbed no less than two times this week, with the second break-in coming early Thursday morning. The first instance was Tuesday morning, with the burglaries being especially brazen given they took place in daylight hours, or just before dawn. The Tuesday incident involved five men in a White SUV, but apparently with no other leads or identifiers. So naturally they hit the same site again, plus others.

But as CWB Chicago details of the second break-in, it appears the criminals are positively boasting about the ease of mass theft in a seemingly “lawless” windy city: “A group of armed burglars broke into two Lakeview convenience stores, dumped their stolen cash registers in front of Gov. JB Pritzker’s home, and then burglarized the Burberry store on Michigan Avenue early Thursday.”

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This is the one year anniversary of the disgraceful rioting in the Capitol building. The scenes of that day are seared in the memory of many of us. I publicly condemned Trump’s speech while it was being given and I called for a bipartisan vote of censure over his responsibility in the riots. However, I have long maintained that there was no evidence to support a criminal charge against Trump for incitement.

Yet, a year ago, various legal experts declared that Trump should be charged based on his speech and his delay in calling for protesters to leave Capitol Hill. District of Columbia Attorney General Karl Racine announced that he was considering arresting Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Rudy Giuliani and U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks with inciting the violent invasion of the U.S. Capitol. So, a year later, what ever happened to the prosecution of Donald Trump?

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Chuck Schumer all by himself should be enough to turn an honest person off to politics.

Chuck Schumer is every Nazi’s caricature of Jews made flesh. The ADL ought to be picketing him every day.

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The proto-fascists among us have delighted in issuing “emergency” orders relating to the coronavirus. These have included, among others, shutdowns and mask and vaccine mandates. The Governor of Minnesota went so far as to issue an “emergency” order prohibiting all residents of the state from leaving their houses without his permission.

Many have speculated that statists’ overreaction to covid has been a dry run for more “emergencies” to come. Indeed the supply of potential emergencies is large, particularly when “science” can reliably be deployed on behalf of the state.

Support for such speculation comes from an article published by Cambridge University Press under the auspices of the American Political Science Association. The article is titled “Political Legitimacy, Authoritarianism, and Climate Change” and was authored by Ross Mittiga, a young academic who ran unsuccessfully for the Virginia House of Delegates in 2017 as a Democrat.

The Hill.

For more than a decade, Democrats worked to build a voting base composed of minorities and unmarried women. After Donald Trump’s 2020 loss, it would appear the mission was being accomplished. White voters dropped from 81 percent of the electorate in 2000 to just 67 percent two decades later. Meanwhile, Biden carried a whopping 63 percent of single women in 2020.

However, poor public policy over the past year is already casting the idea of a continuing Democratic majority in doubt. Recent polling suggests that Hispanic and Black Americans are more likely to vote as individuals than as aggrieved racial blocs.

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The U.S. Justice Department announced this week that thousands of federal prison inmates who were sent home due to the pandemic will not be required to return to prison to serve their sentences. The DOJ reversed an opinion by the Trump administration’s Department of Legal Counsel stating that the Bureau of Prisons “must recall prisoners in home confinement to correctional facilities” if they do not meet the normal home-arrest criteria.

Scott Johnson at Power Line.

The Clinton presidential campaign’s fabrication of the Russia hoax is the dirtiest trick in American political history. Beginning with Glenn Simpson/Fusion GPS and the Perkins Coie law firm, it enlisted co-conspirators in the Obama Department of Justice, the FBI, and the mainstream media. The principals are not only still at large, they have achieved high office, wealth, riches, and Pulitzer Prizes. They will never be brought to justice. They won’t even break a sweat.

We were never meant to be clued in. As the veil of the fraud was pierced by Rep. Devin Nunes and others including, most recently, John Durham, we now have a good handle on the con. It is almost unbelievable. It is also an inexhaustibly rich subject.

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‘Allegations of bigotry’ and ‘calls for impeachment’? Sounds as if they’re practicing to be Democrats.

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The Democratic frontrunner for Arizona governor played a central role in firing a black female staffer after she complained that she was paid less than her white male colleagues, a federal court jury found in a multimillion-dollar discrimination case.

The jury awarded that state legislative staffer, Talonya Adams, $2.75 million after it found that Adams “was being discriminated against on the basis of race or sex with respect to her pay and was terminated for that reason” in 2015. Adams blamed Arizona secretary of state Katie Hobbs (D.) for the firing, saying Hobbs—who served as minority leader in the state senate at the time—”seems wholly disconnected from people of color.”

“This was Katie Hobbs’s decision,” Adams told Phoenix-based 12 News. “I think she’s always been very uncomfortable with minorities. She seems wholly disconnected from people of color.”

Steve Sailer.

A seldom-explained problem slowing the Democrats’ march to a permanent one-party state is that while their electoral grand strategy is impressively opportunistic, sleazy, and dangerous to the country, Democrats don’t like to think of themselves as the cunning bad guys.

Therefore, they blow elections, such as last week’s governor’s race in Virginia, by taking their own rationalizations for their schemes at face value. Ironically, the Democrats’ success at generating talking points for the press makes it hard for them to remember that their gambits are ruses rather than ethical imperatives. So they wind up taking their stances too far for their own electoral good.

Virtue-signaling doesn’t work too well if what you’re signaling is not, in fact, virtue.

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The husband of an Iowa Democrat running for Congress as a moderate locked down his Facebook account after the Washington Free Beacon asked about his posts comparing American Christians to Islamic terrorists, predicting Republicans would put people in gas chambers, and expressing hope that former president Donald Trump would get the coronavirus.

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A group of House Democrats will propose a resolution urging the Biden administration to condemn Israel and support six Palestinian groups that were designated as terrorist organizations by the Jewish state.

In response to Israel’s terrorist designations, Rep. Betty McCollum (D., Minn.) plans to introduce a resolution celebrating the designated Palestinian groups for the “value and importance” of their “courageous work,” according to Haaretz. The resolution will be cosponsored by several House Democrats, including Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), and Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.).

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A former Weather Underground militant has been granted parole 40 years after taking part in the infamous Brink’s armored car robbery that left two policemen and a security guard dead, it was announced Tuesday.

David Gilbert, 77, will be released by Nov. 30, the New York Department of Corrections said. He had been convicted of taking part in the ambush, which was planned by the Black Liberation Army.

Gilbert was granted a parole hearing after former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, D-N.Y., commuted his 75-years-to-life sentence, The New York Times reported.

The disgraced Cuomo did so in one of his final acts as governor before leaving office amid numerous sexual harassment allegations. Gilbert otherwise would not have been eligible for parole until 2056.

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A former Bernie Sanders adviser indicted for embezzling money from a labor union is now leading the progressive push to unseat Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D., Ariz.).

Chuck Rocha, the founder of Nuestro PAC, launched the “Run Ruben Run” campaign to encourage Rep. Ruben Gallego (D., Ariz.) to primary Sinema in 2024. Rocha’s criminal past surfaced during the 2016 presidential campaign after he joined the Sanders campaign. The longtime labor activist was sentenced to 24 months probation and fined $2,000 after he was convicted of embezzling funds from the United Steelworkers International Union, where he served as political director. Rocha admitted to misusing a union credit card in 2008 and 2009 to pay for golf outings and Stanley Cup tickets.

Nuestro PAC is one of several groups working to unseat Sinema because of her opposition to President Joe Biden’s massive $3.5 trillion “Build Back Better” initiative. Way to Win, a group funded by liberal donor George Soros, formed the Primary Sinema PAC, though it has not endorsed a specific candidate. The primary efforts highlight growing disunity within the Democratic Party over the Biden spending plan.