The Full Belmonte, 2/5/2022
“SALT LAKE CITY — The ongoing battle over the future of the Republican Party erupted into open view Friday as former vice president Mike Pence said it would have been ‘un-American’ for him to overturn the election at Donald Trump’s insistence and the party’s grass-roots members overwhelmingly voted to censure two Republicans for investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Trump loomed over the day’s action, though he was absent as the party’s top activists and donors huddled in Utah and a prominent conservative legal group hosted Pence and some of the party’s top figures in Florida.
In both cases, grappling with Trump’s repeated false attacks on the 2020 election results — and the pro-Trump mob that ransacked the Capitol one year ago — was the source of discord at a time when the party is trying to remain united ahead of the midterm elections.
In Utah, where activists and donors gathered for the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting, the party took the unprecedented step of formally condemning two Republican lawmakers, Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, for their work on the House Jan. 6 committee — and made moves that would allow the party to send money and political help to Cheney’s primary opponent.
The censure was pushed by RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, and the vote was overwhelming, passing without any public debate. It took all of one minute.
There was no pretense that the punishment was about anything other than the investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection — the most serious attack on the Capitol since the War of 1812 — and what happened before and after the riot.
In Florida, Pence, Trump’s ever-loyal vice president, took his most explicit shots at the former president, saying ‘President Trump is wrong’ when he called for Pence to overturn the election by rejecting electors from several states who supported Joe Biden when Congress gathered on Jan. 6 to certify the election. He drew raucous applause from the crowd of conservative lawyers at the Federalist Society conference.
Christopher Krebs, a former top cybersecurity official in the Trump administration who was fired by Trump, said: ‘Broadly speaking, I think Trump’s influence is waning, particularly among the reasonable people. But it’s really crystallizing in the most malignant way. It’s consolidating and getting much more intense — and more dangerous — among the die-hard supporters.’
The moves, playing out in luxury hotels, led to unusual schisms, with a former vice president criticizing the former president he was often obsequious to in a way he had never been before and Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), the party’s 2012 presidential nominee, harshly criticizing the party his niece runs for its treatment of Cheney and Kinzinger.
‘Shame falls on a party that would censure persons of conscience, who seek truth in the face of vitriol,’ he tweeted. ‘Honor attaches to Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for seeking truth even when doing so comes at great personal cost.’
The day showed that Trump’s efforts to overturn the election and his continuing focus on his false insistence that he won continue to dominate the party, even as its leaders say they want to focus on President Biden’s policies as his polling numbers lag and Republicans argue they are poised to make major gains in November’s midterm elections.
Trump remains the most popular figure in the GOP, according to most public and private polling. His political committee has $122 million — more than any other major political party committee — with much of it raised off his false claims that the election was stolen. Many of the party’s members are unwilling to criticize him, even for his role in the Jan. 6 attack, and even some Pence allies expected a sharp rebuke from Trump on Friday that could be politically painful for the former vice president. Trump still draws a bigger crowd than any other Republican.
But some of the former president’s advisers fear he is losing steam politically as he continues to talk about the election, multiple federal and state investigations circle him and polls show his support among Republicans has lagged some in recent months. Trump’s spokesman did not respond to a request for comment on the day’s affairs.” Read more at Washington Post
“(CNN) As of Friday, more than 900,000 people in the United States have died of Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
Experts believe the true burden of disease to be much higher. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that the number of Covid-19 deaths in the US was about 32% higher than reported between February 2020 and September 2021.
For the past two weeks, there have been more than 2,000 new Covid-19 deaths reported each day in the US, according to Johns Hopkins.
The World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a global pandemic on March 11, 2020.” Read more at CNN
“SALT LAKE CITY — In an extraordinary rebuke, the Republican National Committee on Friday voted Friday to condemn Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), the two Republican members of a House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.
The censure resolution passed overwhelmingly on a voice vote without debate or discussion, with the whole process taking about one minute. The party said the behavior of Cheney and Kinzinger ‘has been destructive to the institution of the U.S. House of Representatives, the Republican Party and our republic.’
The resolution accused the two of participating in a ‘Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens who engaged in legitimate political discourse’ as the committee investigates the insurrection in which a mob of Trump supporters stormed the building, injured 140 members of law enforcement and vandalized the Capitol to stop the affirmation of Joe Biden’s electoral college win. The attack led to the deaths of five people.
In a statement Friday afternoon, RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel sought to clarify the resolution’s language, saying it was meant to refer to ‘ordinary citizens who engaged in legitimate political discourse that had nothing to do with violence at the Capitol.’
In addition to Friday’s formal censure at the party’s winter meeting in Salt Lake City, the RNC also made plans to fund a primary challenge against Cheney in Wyoming — after state Republican leaders passed a special rule to recognize Harriet Hageman, her challenger, as the party’s presumptive nominee.
David Bossie, a top Trump ally who led the censure effort, called it a ‘one-two punch’ against Cheney that signaled a message from the GOP at the state and national levels. McDaniel defended the move Thursday in an interview with The Washington Post.” Read more at Washington Post
Getting ahead of the RNC's expected vote, Cheney said in a statementyesterday that she's ‘a constitutional conservative’ and called the GOP leaders ‘hostages’ to Trump.
‘I do not recognize those in my party who have abandoned the Constitution to embrace Donald Trump,’ she said. ‘History will be their judge.’
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), another member of the Jan. 6 committee, said Cheney should wear the censure ‘as a badge of pride.’” Read more at Axios
Ben Hasty/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle via Getty Images
“The economy added 467,000 jobs in January, far more than expected given the surge in coronavirus cases due to the omicron variant. The numbers were a massive surprise to economists, who predicted the jobs report would show anything from a loss of 400,000 to an increase of 385,000 jobs.” [Vox] Read more at Reuters / Lucia Mutikani
“January jobs reports sometimes reflect a seasonal change anyway; jobs filled by temporary workers over the holiday season don’t exist anymore, which skews the numbers. But that particular phenomenon may not have factored in this year, since an extremely tight labor market may have pushed employers to hang on to the seasonal temporary workers.” [Vox] Read more at Axios / Neil Irwin
“January’s numbers, combined with revised data from the end of 2021, show job gains of 6.6 million over the past year. But, at the same time, the unemployment rate increased just a bit to 4 percent, and more than 3.6 million people — about 2 percent of the labor force — reported Covid-19-related absences, more than at any other point in the past two years.” [Vox] Read more at NYT / Ben Casselman and Talmon Joseph Smith
“The tight labor market, though, has spurred wage increases — they’re up an average of 5.7 percent over the past year. Low unemployment and higher wages are encouraging signs that the Federal Reserve can raise interest rates to try to lower inflation, which is surging to the point that it’s wiping out wage gains.” [Vox] Read more at WSJ / Sarah Chaney Cambon and Gabriel T. Rubin
“The service and hospitality industry led January’s jobs boom, adding 151,000 jobs primarily in bars and restaurants. The overall labor force participation rose from 61.9 percent to 62.2 percent, with Black women pushing that number and participating in the labor force at a rate of 61.9 percent.” [Vox] Read more at Washington Post / Eli Rosenberg
“Facebook parent company Meta’s valuation has fallen $232 billion, the biggest one-day drop in the history of the stock market.” [Vox] Read more at CNBC / Alex Sherman
“The North Carolina Supreme Court on Friday upended Republican efforts to lock in political dominance in the state, saying that congressional and state legislative maps were partisan gerrymanders that violated the State Constitution.
The ruling requires the Republican-controlled legislature not only to submit new maps to the court, but to offer a range of statistical analyses to show ‘a significant likelihood that the districting plan will give the voters of all political parties substantially equal opportunity to translate votes into seats’ in elections.
The requirement rebuffed the argument against redrawing the maps that the legislature offered in oral arguments before the court this week: that the court had no right to say whether and when political maps cross the line from acceptable partisanship into unfairness.
The justices’ 4-3 decision, split along party lines, not only sets a precedent for judging the legality of future maps in the state, but could play an important role in the struggle for control of the House of Representatives in elections this November. The Republican-drawn maps had effectively allotted the party control of at least 10 of the 14 House seats the state will have in the next Congress, even though voters statewide are roughly equally divided between the two parties.” Read more at New York Times
“WASHINGTON — The case of a mentally ill detainee at Guantánamo Bay, Mohammed al-Qahtani, has long confounded the United States government. Suspected of being Al Qaeda’s intended 20th hijacker in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, he was tortured by military interrogators early in his detention at the American naval base in Cuba.
A senior Pentagon official later determined that, because of how Mr. Qahtani was initially treated, he could not be prosecuted. Security officials also considered him too dangerous to release, so he has remained detained for two decades.
On Friday, the Pentagon said that a parole-like board had recommended repatriating Mr. Qahtani to Saudi Arabia to a custodial rehabilitation and mental health care program for extremists. The Biden administration is expected to send him there as early as March.
The move followed a report last spring by a Navy doctor who concluded that Mr. Qahtani, who is in his 40s, should be transferred because he could not receive the medical treatment he needed at Guantánamo and was too impaired to pose a future threat — especially if he was sent to inpatient mental care, according to people briefed on that report.” Read more at New York Times
“Two men convicted on state murder charges of killing Ahmaud Arbery withdrew their guilty pleas in a separate federal hate-crimes case. The judge had rejected the proposed agreement that would’ve let Travis McMichael and his father, Gregory McMichael, avoid a trial. The McMichaels, along with William ‘Roddie’ Bryan Jr., were sentenced to life in prison after a Georgia jury convicted them in November for fatally shooting the 25-year-old Black man in February 2020. Federal jury selection for the trial of the three white men starts Monday.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“NEW YORK — Attorneys spent the second day of Sarah Palin’s defamation trial against the New York Times grilling the author of an erroneous editorial in sometimes excruciating detail — going so far as to probe her reading habits more than a decade ago, and at one point prompting the judge to consult a dictionary.
It’s the first libel case against the Times to go to trial in 18 years, and it is a test of decades of broad legal protections for news organizations writing about public figures. Elizabeth Williamson — author of a flawed 2017 editorial on gun policy at the heart of the case — sat on the stand for several hours Friday while Times lawyers sought to portray her as a careful, evenhanded journalist, and Palin’s team accused her of being part of an organization out to smear the former governor of Alaska and vice-presidential candidate.
On the stand in a Manhattan federal courthouse, Williamson recalled her memories from the morning of June 14, 2017, when a shooting at a Republican baseball practice in Alexandria, Va., injured several members of Congress, some gravely, including Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.). ‘I thought that as the facts were emerging that this might be a significant event,’ she testified.
Williamson wrote an editorial that afternoon, entitled ‘America’s Lethal Politics,’ which Palin alleges defamed her by connecting a 2011 mass shooting in Arizona to an advertisement her political action committee had put out months earlier, featuring crosshairs superimposed over that part of the state as well as other congressional districts. Although the ad named Democratic Congress members including then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), who was wounded in the shooting, fact-checkers have debunked the notion that it inspired the shooting.
Williamson’s testimony amounted to a detailed retelling of an error in the making. She explained how the piece in question was conceptualized, researched, written, edited and in the end corrected — twice. But her testimony and the trial’s evidence made clear that responsibility for the some of the most problematic parts of the editorial fell to the Times’s editorial page editor at the time, James Bennet, who is expected to testify next week.
Williamson said she initially pitched an editorial on gun policy but that Bennet sent her an email suggesting she also explore ‘whether there’s a point to make about the rhetoric of demonization and whether it incites people to this kind of violence.’” Read more at Washington Post
“WASHINGTON — A broad and bipartisan group of senators is coalescing around legislation to create a high-level independent commission, modeled after the one that examined the Sept. 11 attacks, with broad powers to investigate the origins of the coronavirus pandemic and the response across the Trump and Biden administrations.
Under a plan proposed by the top Democrat and Republican on the Senate Health Committee — Senators Patty Murray of Washington and Richard Burr of North Carolina — a 12-member panel would have subpoena power to ‘get a full accounting of what went wrong during this pandemic,’ Murray said in an interview, and make recommendations for the future.” Read more at Boston Globe
“WASHINGTON — After months of stalled negotiations, the House on Friday passed a bill aimed at making the United States more economically competitive with China by boosting the nation’s manufacturing and research capabilities.
The 222-to-210 vote on the $250 billion America Competes Act fell mostly along party lines, with Republicans arguing that it was not tough enough on China and that GOP lawmakers were not given an adequate chance to offer input on the legislation.” Read more at Boston Globe
“MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — The Minneapolis mayor imposed a moratorium on no-knock warrants Friday, two days after a SWAT team entered a downtown apartment and killed Amir Locke, a 22-year-old Black man who his parents said was ‘executed’ after he was startled from a deep sleep and reached for a legal firearm to protect himself.
Mayor Jacob Frey said while the moratorium is in place, he and police leadership will review and revise department policy with the help of two experts who helped shape Breonna’s Law, the ban on no-knock warrants that was imposed in Louisville, Kentucky, following the death of Breonna Taylor in a botched raid at her home in 2020.” Read more at Boston Globe
“NEW YORK — Michael Avenatti, an attorney who rose to national prominence representing adult film actress Stormy Daniels as she took on Donald Trump, was convicted on Friday of charges related to taking $300,000 from Daniels by siphoning payments of her book-deal advance.
Avenatti was found guilty on counts of wire fraud and aggravated identity theft in U.S. District Court in Manhattan after about two days of deliberations. He faces up to 22 years in prison and will be sentenced May 24. Avenatti was allowed to remain free to surrender himself to federal authorities in California, where he has a pending federal embezzlement case. He was previously on home confinement there.
‘I am very disappointed in the jury’s verdict. I am looking forward to a full adjudication of all of the issues on appeal,’ a defiant Avenatti said outside the courtroom, flanked by a team of federal public defenders who were initially set to try his case but who served as his advisers after he decided to represent himself.
At trial, prosecutors argued that Avenatti stole from Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, by faking her signature on a form that rerouted wire transfers from the promised $800,000 advance from her memoir “Full Disclosure” to an account he controlled. He then spent months brushing off her questions about the missing installments — leading her to believe the publishing company was failing to pay her.” Read more at Washington Post
“Delta Air Lines has asked the Justice Department to help set up a national ‘no-fly’ list of unruly passengers that would bar them from getting on any commercial air carrier, amid a surge in ‘air rage’ incidents during the pandemic.
In a letter sent to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland Thursday, the Atlanta-based company’s chief executive Edward H. Bastian said such a list would reduce the number of future incidents involving disruptive passengers. It will also ‘serve as a strong symbol of the consequences of not complying with crew member instructions,’ he wrote.
News of Bastian’s letter requesting government involvement was first reported by Reuters. Delta has previously called for an industry-wide effort to keep passengers from boarding competitors’ flights after being banned for disruptive behavior.” Read more at Washington Post
“Like Reddit and YouTube before it, Twitter is getting its own ‘dislike’ button for replies or comments in response to original tweets. The feature, announced in July, started rolling out globally Thursday night, the company said. And like other Twitter updates before it, reception is mixed. Some people see the button as a way to curb harassment, trolling and misinformation. Others like Bowders worry that Twitter is offloading content moderation to its users and making it easier for people to silence and avoid opinions they don’t like.
Twitter has a confusing new policy on what images you can post. Here’s what you need to know.
This is the latest Twitter update targeting content moderation challenges. In November, the company expanded its rules to prohibit sharing photos of people without their consent — unless it’s in the public interest to do so. Some neo-Nazis and far-right activists used the rule to report photos revealing their identities, while anti-extremism researchers found themselves targeted by a flood of bad-faith reports. The platform has long been plagued by problems with hate speech and harassment, including in its new audio chat rooms.
‘We’re always looking for new ways to increase healthy participation and engagement on Twitter,’ Twitter spokeswoman Celeste Carswell said. ‘We are still in the learning stage of this experiment and are looking to gain a better understanding of how Reply Downvoting could help us better surface the most relevant content for people on Twitter in the future.’
Carswell did not respond to questions about how the company will use downvotes to change what content people see, but she said that for now, downvotes will not impact the order in which replies show up.
Not everyone sees the downvote button yet, but it appears to be available to a growing portion of U.S. accounts.
To downvote a tweet, tap the downward-facing arrow below it. Twitter says you will see fewer similar tweets in the future, though it’s hard to know what that means or how the company will determine what makes two tweets similar. The tweet’s author won’t see that you downvoted — and you won’t know about any downvotes on your own tweets, either.” Read more at Washington Post
“1.9 million — The estimated number of arrests U.S. Border Patrol agents made in 2021, as the number of people trying to cross the Mexican border swelled to a record high.
$3 — The discount on a future order that Domino's will give you if you pick up your online order instead of getting it delivered. The pizza chain says it needs more delivery drivers at its U.S. stores. Staffing shortages are a problem in many industries.
34% — The share of all home buyers in 2021 who are first-timers, according to the National Association of Realtors. Many of those who are jumping into the housing market for the first time ever are confronting higher costs than they expected, especially now.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
Fireworks lit up the sky during the opening ceremony of the Beijing 2022 Winter Games.
PHOTO: ANNE-CHRISTINE POUJOULAT/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
“The Beijing Olympics have begun.
The opening ceremony was held today, a glittery display that included thousands of performers and an athlete from the Xinjiang region as co-lighter of the Olympic flame. The U.S. government and some allies have called the Chinese government’s treatment of largely Muslim minorities in that area—which includes mass detentions in internment camps and omnipresent surveillance—a form of genocide. China disputes the accusations. Concern about alleged human-rights abuses prompted a diplomatic boycott of the Winter Games; the U.S. is among the countries not sending official delegations of dignitaries. In contrast, Russian President Vladimir Putin held a summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping shortly before the Olympics began. The Beijing Games also are proving awkward for some Olympic sponsors.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“Blood supplies in the U.S. are low.
The Covid-19 pandemic put a dent in donations, because with fewer people commuting to workplaces and attending in-person classes and worship services, there went employer-, school- and church-hosted blood drives. Blood banks have typically relied heavily on older adults; an estimated 45% of donors are over age 50, according to the Association for the Advancement of Blood & Biotherapies. But that age group, which is at greater risk for severe Covid-19 outcomes, may have been reluctant to participate in blood drives during the pandemic. Even so, demand for blood is rebounding as people resume non-urgent medical care. Shortages have forced some hospitals to space out procedures and cancel elective surgeries. More than half of the country’s community blood centers have more no more than a two-day supply of blood, an industry group said; three or more days’ worth is the standard to operate normally.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“The EU has imposed sanctions on Mali’s prime minister and coup leaders after elections have been delayed and the transitional government has failed to implement reforms.” [Vox] Read more at Al Jazeera