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Mother Jones

Nevada’s MAGA Secretary of State Candidate Appears to Be Blatantly Ignoring Campaign Finance Law

Even by the anything-goes standards of post-Citizens United America, the campaign finance practices of far-right Nevada secretary of state candidate Jim Marchant are comically reckless and almost certainly illegal, according to multiple complaints filed with the state. In May, Marchant’s Republican primary opponent Jesse Haw submitted a complaint accusing him of “an inexcusable violation of Nevada […]

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GOP Candidate Mark Finchem’s Lawyer Proposed Fake Elector Votes That “Aren’t Legal”

This past weekend, Mark Finchem, the Republican candidate for secretary of state in Arizona, took precious time away from campaigning to fly to Florida to participate in a conference of 2020 election denialists and conspiracy theory extremists. His attendance was hardly surprising. The QAnon-friendly Finchem, who was recently accused of posting an antisemitic tweet and […]

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Biden Threatens Windfall Tax on Excessive Oil Profits

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. President Joe Biden on Monday threatened to pursue new legislation that would tax the windfall profits made by fossil fuel companies this year if they don’t ramp up production to help bring down the historically-high energy costs being […]

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How to Understand the Connection between the Herschel Walker Abortion Stories and His Abuse

The second woman to allege that football star-turned-Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker pressured her to have an abortion amid an affair told her story in more detail on Tuesday, saying that Walker had told her she and the child would “not be safe” if she went through with the pregnancy. “I felt threatened and I thought I had […]

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The Next Political Battleground: State Supreme Court Races

For decades as a Republican legislator in Kentucky, Joseph Fischer has pushed bills to restrict abortion. He sponsored the state’s 2019 “trigger law” making the procedure a felony. which went into effect once the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade. He was also behind House Bill 91, which would change the state Constitution to read that it “does not […]

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Takeoff, Rapper of Atlanta Group Migos, Shot and Killed in Houston Bowling Alley

On Tuesday, the 28-year-old rapper Kirshnik Khari Ball, better known as Takeoff, was shot and killed at a bowling alley in Houston, Texas. He was a member of the influential rap trio Migos—whose songs include hits like “Bad and Boujee,” “Walk It, Talk It,” and “Motorsport.” According to local authorities, Takeoff was playing dice alongside […]

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Bolsonaro—the “Trump of the Tropics”—Doesn’t Concede But He Doesn’t Contest the Election Results

After almost 48 hours of a deafening silence, Brazil’s defeated President Jair Bolsonaro addressed the nation in a brief speech that only served to cement his already well-established diminished political stature. On Sunday, Bolsonaro became the first president to lose reelection after the tightest presidential race in the country’s recent history against President-Elect Luiz Inácio Lula […]

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The Supreme Court Wants to Move on From Racism Already

The conservative Supreme Court appears poised to ban the use of race in college admissions. During five hours of oral arguments on Monday in two affirmative action cases, all six conservative justices were skeptical of using race as a factor in college admissions. The cases invite the conservatives to rule that using race in any […]

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How One Group Is Tackling Voter Intimidation In Arizona

Mari Alvarado, a retired public school teacher, has served as an election poll worker in Arizona’s Maricopa County for more than a decade, but she’s never experienced anything like she has in the last two years. “It used to be boring!” she said. “All we had was ‘who brought the donuts.’ Now it’s like you […]

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Top GOP Secretary of State Candidates Hobnob with Extreme Conspiracy Theorists

If you want to see just how crazy the GOP has become, you need only watch the video recording of a conference on “election integrity” held in Florida on Saturday by a group of 2020 election denialists. In attendance, either virtually or in person, were the Republican candidates running for secretary of state—the guardians of […]

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World’s Nations Face Shrinking Odds of Taming Climate Mayhem

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. It has been an alarming time for climate scientists. One by one, the grim scenarios they had outlined for the near future have been overtaken by events: extreme storms, droughts, floods and ice-sheet collapses whose sudden appearances have outstripped researchers’ worst predictions. […]

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Trump’s Big Liars Urge Brazil’s Bolsonaro to Refuse to Concede

Top purveyors of former President Donald Trump’s election fraud lies are now calling for Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro to follow Trump’s lead and refuse to admit defeat. “Bolsonaro can’t concede,” Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who in 2020 helped Trump carry out a plan to convince backers that he had not lost, said on Sunday. […]

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Yes, Trump and the Republican Party Own the Attack on Paul and Nancy Pelosi

The suspect who allegedly targeted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and brutally beat her husband Paul with a hammer after breaking into their San Francisco home late last week was charged in federal court on Monday with assault and attempted kidnapping. A trail of recent social media activity indicates that 42-year-old David DePape was fixated on […]

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The Trumps Are the Real Victims in the Trump Organization Fraud Case, Defense Lawyers Argue

Opening statements started Monday in the criminal trial over whether the Trump Organization committed tax fraud, and lawyers representing the former president’s businesses immediately made their strategy clear: Throw longtime CFO Allen Weisselberg under the bus, over and over. “Weisselberg did it for Weissleberg!” Michael van der Veen, an attorney representing Trump’s payroll company, shouted at […]

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Of Course Republicans Are Mocking the Brutal Attack on Nancy Pelosi’s Husband

There’s nothing to celebrate about the gruesome attack on Paul Pelosi, the 82-year-old husband of Nancy Pelosi after he was left gravely injured by an intruder who had broken into the couple’s San Francisco home last week. But isn’t that obvious? For some, apparently not. There was the wildly irresponsible tweet from Twitter’s new “Chief […]

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Blaming Larry Krasner for Gun Violence Does Not Make Statistical Sense

Republican lawmakers in Pennsylvania are trying to impeach Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, a reformist prosecutor who built a national reputation for attempting to curb mass incarceration and hold violent cops accountable, and who was overwhelmingly reelected last year to a second term. Impeachment proceedings often follow allegations of criminal behavior or corruption, but Krasner […]

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The Supreme Court Is Set to Kill Affirmative Action. Just Not for Rich White Kids.

When he was eight years old, Michael Wang decided he wanted to go to Harvard. “I don’t know if it’s the Asian stereotype,” he told me, “but I saw it as an avenue to social mobility.” Though he wouldn’t have thought of it in these terms when he was eight, Michael meant the sort of […]

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Russians Used a US Firm to Funnel Funds to GOP in 2018. Dems Say the FEC Let Them Get Away With It.

The Federal Election Commission recently let a US company that was quietly bankrolled by Russian oligarchs off with a slap on the wrist despite discovering that it had illegally funneled Russian funds to US political candidates in the 2018 midterm elections, two Democratic FEC commissioners said in a scathing statement issued Friday. “Half the Commission chose […]

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Elon Musk, Free Speech Absolutist, Is Silent About His Saudi Partners

Elon Musk is a self-declared “free-speech absolutist” who might let Donald Trump and various Nazis return to action on Twitter. “The bird is freed,” he triumphantly tweeted to his approximately 112 million followers when he officially took over one of the most popular social media sites on Thursday. Musk’s idea of open debate apparently entailed his trolling […]

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It’s Been 10 Years Since Sandy. Is New York Any More Prepared for the Next Superstorm?

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In marking the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Sandy smashing into New York City, campaigners are warning that insufficient action by governments to tackle the climate crisis risks a repeat of such damaging and increasingly fierce storms. Sandy made landfall with a huge impact […]

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Watch Barack Obama Attack a GOP Senator for Eyeing Social Security Cuts

Barack Obama is campaigning in key battleground states for Democrats ahead of the midterm election. And in remarks Saturday, as he laid into Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) for threatening cuts to Social Security benefits, the former president reminded everyone of just how good a communicator he is. Wow pic.twitter.com/0EabEDaau6 — Acyn (@Acyn) October 29, 2022 “Some of you […]

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Climate Activists Are Waging a New Kind of Legal Fight

This story was originally published by Hakai Magazine and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Fifteen-year-old Brianna K. (known as Kū) loves listening to her family tell stories about the wildlife they grew up with along the shores of west Maui, Hawaiʻi. The stories describe diverse, vital ecosystems. They tell of things that have […]

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Experts Are Seeing a Wave of QAnon-linked Crimes. The Attack on Pelosi’s Husband Might Be the Latest.

David DePape, the man accused of bludgeoning the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi early Friday morning apparently posted a lot of politically extreme things online and apparently subscribed to a lot of conspiracy theories. Among them: QAnon. According to the Associated Press, DePape wrote blog posts as recently as August 24 promoting the far-right […]

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At Least 146 Killed in Seoul Halloween Crowd Surge

At least 146 people were crushed and killed on Saturday night in a crowd that had gathered to celebrate Halloween in a popular nightclub district of Seoul, according to city officials, in what is now one of South Korea’s deadliest peacetime tragedies. At least 150 more were injured. Television and social media videos of the […]

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US Finally Releases 75-Year-Old Guantanamo Bay Inmate

The Guantanamo Bay detention center isn’t anyone’s idea of an assisted living facility. But the controversial prison that former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared in 2002 would hold “the worst of the worst” terrorism suspects has been open for so long that many inmates are now elderly people with health problems. Today, the Biden administration finally […]

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Democracy Is Hanging By a Thread in Wisconsin. Blame Extreme Voting Maps.

On Saturday, former President Barack Obama will be campaigning in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for Democratic candidates in close contests for governor and U.S. Senate, urging voters to go to the polls. But when it comes to controlling state politics, Democrats are facing an uphill battle. While elections are often decided by razor-thin margins in this pivotal […]

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GOP Secretary of State Candidates Scheduled to Appear with a White Nationalist and Conspiracy Theorists

An ally of white nationalists; a former CEO and conspiracy theorist who tried to convince Donald Trump to use the National Guard to seize voting machines after the 2020 election; an Ohio math teacher who claims he discovered an algorithm showing that virtually every county in the United States was hacked to prevent Trump’s reelection […]

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US Culture Wars Have Stormed the Hyper-Polarized Brazilian Elections

The first time many Brazilians heard of Nikolas Ferreira was the day the newly elected federal lawmaker received the highest number of votes in the country’s 2022 legislative elections—and in the history of the key battleground state of Minas Gerais in southeast Brazil. Born in an impoverished favela, the 26-year-old self-described conservative Christian “defender of […]

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JFK Jr.’s Iconic Magazine Is Back From the Dead. You Can Thank QAnon.

Virtually every one of the 70 or so speakers at Michael Flynn’s ReAwaken America tour last weekend in Manheim, Pennsylvania, had something to sell, and Gene Ho was no exception. There was his book, TRUMPography: How Biblical Principles Paved the Way to the American Presidency, a memoir of sorts about Ho’s time as Trump’s personal photographer […]

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Elon Musk, and Maybe You, Misunderstand The Problem with Twitter

Before his deal to buy Twitter became official, Elon Musk “wanted to reach out personally” to Twitter advertisers by tweeting an open letter to his 12 million followers. Dear Twitter Advertisers pic.twitter.com/GMwHmInPAS — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 27, 2022 The letter is an appeal. In it, Musk sounds like many who have grown weary of […]

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