Rep. Antonio Delgado (D-NY) will be sworn in as lieutenant governor on Wednesday, WNYC reports.
That allows Gov. Kathy Hochul to call the special election to replace him in Congress for Aug. 23, the same day as the primary.
Rep. Antonio Delgado (D-NY) will be sworn in as lieutenant governor on Wednesday, WNYC reports.
That allows Gov. Kathy Hochul to call the special election to replace him in Congress for Aug. 23, the same day as the primary.
“When Lara Logan reached the heights of American journalism more than a decade ago, as the chief foreign affairs correspondent for CBS News, her bosses didn’t think twice about sending her to cover the biggest stories in the world. Producers clamored to work with her as she landed interviews with a Taliban commander, chronicled the Arab Spring and tracked the Ebola outbreak. Former President Barack Obama called her to wish her well after the most traumatic event of what seemed like a limitless career: She was sexually assaulted while covering a demonstration in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in 2011,” the New York Times reports.
“But today Ms. Logan cuts a far different figure in American media. Instead of on national news broadcasts, she can be found as a guest on right-wing podcasts or speaking at a rally for fringe causes, promoting falsehoods about deaths from Covid vaccines and conspiracy theories about voter fraud.”
Jonathan Bernstein: “We’re living through an era of campaign finance abundance, even though most of the prevailing ideas about money in politics come from an era of scarcity. Loosened laws and regulations have brought big new sources of money — some disclosed, some not — into play. Technological change combined with partisan polarization has produced the phenomenon of big little money — millions of dollars raised in small increments, mostly apparently given by party-loyal voters responding to partisan cues.”
“Overall, there’s just a flood of money. Spending on federal elections alone in 2020 more than doubled the previous record; in fact, there was about as much spent on House and Senate campaigns in 2020 as there was spent on House, Senate and presidential elections combined in 2016.”
“What this means is that virtually every serious candidate in a competitive general election for the House of Representatives, Senate, or a governor’s office will be adequately funded.”
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Mark Leibovich: “This is the great puzzle about Larry Hogan: If the governor thinks the GOP can become the party of Reagan again—and that Hogan himself can lead it there—don’t the continued ascendancies of the J. D. Vances suggest, at the very least, an impossibly uphill battle? Is Hogan just living in a shining city on a hill of wishful thinking? I wondered, in so many words, why he was even bothering.”
“The Supreme Court said Monday that state prisoners may not present new evidence in federal court in support of a claim that their post-conviction counsel in state court was ineffective in violation of the Constitution,” CNN reports.
“The ruling is a major defeat for two inmates on death row who said they had compelling claims that their state lawyers failed to pursue.”
Yascha Mounk: “As someone who lived in many countries—including Germany, Italy, France, and the United Kingdom—before coming to the United States, I have long had the sense that American levels of partisan animosity were exceptionally high. Although I’d seen animosity between left and right in other nations, their hatred never felt so personal or intense as in the U.S.”
“A study just published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace confirms that impression… The authors’ conclusion is startling: No established democracy in recent history has been as deeply polarized as the U.S.”
Washington Post: “Today, as Cuba careens through its worst economic crisis in 30 years, milk is one of the most potent symbols of the country’s precarious state. Cubans have been hit by mass shortages of dairy and other basic goods, reflecting a confluence of setbacks: The coronavirus pandemic crippled the vital tourism industry. Then-President Donald Trump squeezed the island with extra sanctions, and President Biden held off on reversing them. Socialist ally Venezuela reduced aid and investment.”
“The result: A nation that imports 70 percent of its food has run desperately short of the cash to buy it.”
“Last week, Democratic voters in three states nominated a trio of attention-grabbing Senate candidates: a Black man who disavows moderate policies, a towering, tattooed lieutenant governor who insists on wearing shorts, and a Black woman who spent her career in the judiciary,” the Miami Herald reports.
“The choices could signal a bigger change coming for Democrats.”
“A party once accustomed to nominating mostly white, straight-laced men to run in major Senate races is taking a markedly different approach this year, backing candidates across the electoral map with different profiles than their predecessors. It’s a tack more inclusive of women, African Americans and unconventional politicians — the type party leaders and voters alike once feared were unelectable in competitive states.”
“Photographs obtained by ITV News cast fresh doubt on the Prime Minister’s claims that he was unaware of rule-breaking in Downing Street during the pandemic,” ITV News reports.
“The four images show the Prime Minister raising a glass at a leaving party on November 13, 2020, with bottles of alcohol and party food on the table in front of him.”
Bloomberg: “With almost a fifth of the world’s people, limited farmland and the increasing challenge of climate change, President Xi Jinping’s government has exhorted farmers to maximize harvests and consumers to minimize waste. It’s built up huge stockpiles to cope with shortages and created new seeds to boost output.”
“Even so, the country still buys about 60% of all the soybeans that are traded internationally, and ranks as the biggest corn and barley importer. It has also recently emerged as one of the world’s largest wheat buyers. That makes soaring global crop costs and, potentially, a looming world food crisis very much a matter of concern for the government, especially in terms of how local prices perform.”
“We’ll be back, honey. We’ll all be back.”
— Donald Trump, quoted by Axios, when Kellyanne Conway told him she wished he was still in the White House.
“Not many people charged with felony crimes go seven years without ever standing trial. One of them is Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R),” the AP reports.
“The twists and turns of how the Republican, who is on the cusp of winning the GOP nomination for a third term Tuesday, has yet to have his day in court after being indicted on securities fraud charges in 2015 has little comparison in American politics. And along the way, it has upended what it means to be a compromised officeholder in Texas.”
“Former President Donald Trump’s fear of getting hit in the face with a pie was so severe that he repeatedly instructed security guards to savagely beat any hooligan who tries, his ex-attorney recently testified behind closed doors,” the Daily Beast reports.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) asked on his podcast how someone like former Saturday Night Live actor Pete Davidson gets “all of these, like, hot women.”
A diplomat at Russia’s mission to the United Nations in Geneva has resigned over the war in Ukraine, writing that he has never been “so ashamed” of his country, in a rare public rebuke of the war from within the Russian government, the Washington Post reports.
Said Boris Bondarev, a counselor in the Russian mission since 2019: “The aggressive war unleashed by Putin against Ukraine and in fact against the entire Western world is not only a crime against the Ukrainian people but also, perhaps, the most serious crime against the people of Russia.”
“I don’t think it’s nice when they’re telling your 5-year-old that he can go and suck another 5-year-old’s dick. Do you? Because that’s what’s happening in your schools!”
— Rayla Campbell (R), candidate for secretary of state at the Massachusetts Republican convention, quoted by the Boston Globe.
“A notorious Hungarian racist who has called Jews ‘stinking excrement,’ referred to Roma as ‘animals’ and used racial epithets to describe Black people, was a featured speaker at a major gathering of US Republicans in Budapest,” The Guardian reports.
New York Times: “Mr. Perdue’s impending downfall in Tuesday’s primary for governor looms as the biggest electoral setback for Mr. Trump since his own defeat in the 2020 election. There is perhaps no contest in which the former president has done more to try to influence the outcome. Mr. Trump recruited, promoted and cleared the field for his ally, while assailing Mr. Kemp, recording television ads and giving $2.64 million to groups helping Mr. Perdue — by far the most he has ever invested in another politician.”
“Yet the race has exposed the limits of Mr. Trump’s sway, especially against entrenched Republican incumbents.”
Amanda Carpenter: “After a year of threats and bluster, Trump is now nowhere to be seen in the Peach State.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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