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Happy Fourth! Pride In America Plunges Under Trump Presidency (Again)

Americans’ pride in their country has tumbled to a new low, according to a poll released on Monday. Not only is pride at its lowest point since Gallup began asking the question in 2001, but the share has fallen nine points under President Donald Trump this year alone.

Fifty-eight percent of U.S. adults say they feel extremely or very proud to be an American. A year ago, when former President Joe Biden was in office, that number was 67 percent. The highest level of American pride Gallup has measured came in 2002 and 2004, when 91% of Americans were extremely or very proud following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

While Republicans’ pride in being American has increased by seven points since last year, the decline was precipitous among Democrats (down 26 points) and independent voters (down seven points).

There was also a generational divide, with 41 percent of people in Generation Z (born between 1997 and 2012) expressing pride in being American, compared with 58 percent of millennials, 71 percent of Generation X, 75 percent of baby boomers, and 83 percent of people in the Silent and Greatest generations (people born before 1946).

The decline comes as Americans, including millions who backed Trump, are now dealing with the fallout from his second presidential term.

He has started an expensive trade war with much of the world, increasing the costs of doing business for American companies and farmers while also making many household staples more expensive. Trump has responded to these concerns with advice like telling little children to purchase fewer dolls.

Another pressing concern is Trump’s wholehearted embrace of authoritarianism. He has instructed Immigration and Customs Enforcement to attack American cities, abducting vulnerable people—including students—off the street in broad daylight.

Trump has even chosen to arrest and charge Democratic officeholders for attempting to provide oversight of his actions, or roughing them up for dissenting from his administration.

Trump is rolling back civil rights gains by LGBTQ+ Americans and using his administration to erase boundary-breaking achievements by Black people and women.

Everyday Americans brace to see what new way Trump and his team will use their positions of power to enrich themselves, abuse others, or make America look clownish on the international stage.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

GOP Senator: 'It Will Take A Miracle' To Pass Trump's Big Ugly Bill

While Senate Republicans were meeting during a closed-door lunch at the U.S. Capitol, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk posted several tweets slamming President Donald Trump's so-called "Big, Beautiful Bill." This appeared to cause further fractures among the Senate Republican Conference.

That's according to a Tuesday article in NOTUS, which reported that Musk's tweets appeared to result in the rapid undoing of any progress achieved during the meeting, with GOP senators reportedly now "even further from consensus." The outlet reported that "the more likely a senator was to agree with Musk on the reconciliation bill, the more likely they were to have seen his online broadsides."

Musk's posts — in which he called the first major Republican legislative domestic policy push of Trump's second term a "disgusting abomination" — were primarily focused on the bill's ballooning of the federal deficit by trillions of dollars over 10 years. But other Senate Republicans have expressed worry about how the legislation's cuts to Medicaid will affect their constituents. A chorus of Republicans are now reportedly chiming in with proposed changes to the megabill, which would still need to be approved by the House of Representatives should it pass the Senate.

"It's called negotiating," Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) said. "Everyone wants their fingerprints on it."

Other more moderate Republicans, like Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AL), are coming out against other elements of the bill. Collins has said she would oppose the legislation's cuts to PEPFAR — which funds AIDS relief efforts in underdeveloped nations — while Murkowski has railed against Medicaid cuts. Pro-Trump Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) has also repeatedly warned that any bill that cuts Medicaid would not get his support, citing the high number of his constituents who rely on the program.

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) — a more moderate member of the Republican conference — has not openly said whether he would support or oppose the bill in its current form, and has stayed mostly quiet on Musk's outburst, telling NOTUS that the tech titan is "entitled to his opinion." However, he notably said that it would likely take "a miracle" for the Senate to get on the same page on the bill anytime soon.

Even though Republicans enjoy a 53-47 majority in the Senate, and even though the GOP is taking the "reconciliation" route to pass the bill which only requires 51 votes, Republicans can only afford three defections if they hope to send any legislation back to the House. And even staunch conservatives like Sens. Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Rand Paul (R-KY) have gone on the record opposing the bill over its impact on the deficit.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Pardoned January 6 Defendant Wants His Child Porn Indictment Dismissed Too

One man granted clemency by President Donald Trump for laying siege to the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 is now hoping that his pardon will be extended to a separate charge for possession of child pornography.

Politico legal correspondent Kyle Cheney tweeted Wednesday that the legal counsel for 37 year-old David Paul Daniel of North Carolina is now arguing in federal court that his client's child pornography charge should be thrown out based on what he admitted was an "unprecedented legal question."

In the 14-page filing submitted to U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina, attorney William Terpening asserted that Trump's January 20 executive order pardoning the approximately 1,500 people charged in connection with January 6 also covers Daniel's alleged possession of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) due to how it was obtained by law enforcement.

According to Terpening, when police executed a search warrant on Daniel's property and subsequently found an iPhone and a laptop that contained images of a "nude minor female," they were doing so as part of the January 6 charge. He then posited that because Trump pardoned his client for the January 6 charge, the other "derivative" charges that were brought about as a result of the initial charge should be automatically dismissed.

"A pardon completely exonerates a person — it is as if the conviction that is pardoned was never prosecuted in the first instance," Terpening wrote. "The expansive effect of Trump’s Executive Order in erasing not only Mr. Daniel’s January 6 crime, but also any basis for prosecuting it in the first instance, is apparent from the Executive Order’s plain text, which describes the DC Case as 'a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people over the last four years' ... The Order’s intent is undisputedly to convey that the DC Case had no legal basis."

Terpening further argued that the Trump administration's Department of Justice has intervened on behalf of other January 6 defendants facing separate charges that were brought about as a result of January 6-related search warrants. The filing noted that in the case of Capitol rioter Elias Costianes — who had illegal weapons seized at his home following the execution of the initial search warrant — the Trump DOJ clarified in federal court that Trump's pardon extended to the gun charge.

Additionally, January 6 defendant Jeremy Brown, who was convicted on both possession of illegal weapons and classified information from his time in the U.S. military, also had his other charges thrown out. Terpening also attempted to bolster his case by looping in the case of Daniel Ball, who was arrested on federal gun charges just one day after Trump handed down his pardon, but later had those charges dismissed by the DOJ.

"Although the crimes with which Costianes, Ball, and Brown were charged in Maryland and Florida were unrelated to their January 6 charges, the government concluded that the Executive Order required their dismissal because they were based on information discovered by the government during January 6 related searches," Terpening wrote. "Mr. Daniel’s pardon in the DC Case requires dismissal of the unrelated charges in this case because the evidence allegedly supporting the instant charges was discovered during a January 6 related search."

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

MAGA Propaganda Machine Revived Trump -- And It's Still Poisoning America

Donald Trump was reelected president on Tuesday, four years after fomenting a coup which saw a mob of his supporters storm the U.S. Capitol and then leaving the White House in disgrace. He owes his return at least in part to a rankly dishonest right-wing information ecosystem that helped carry him through countless scandals that would have ended the careers of most politicians, driving his comeback to the pinnacle of power.

Conservative audiences are dependent on a right-wing media complex that bombards them with falsehoods and grievances while dissuading them from consulting any alternative sources of information, be they legacy news outlets or government officials or medical experts.

Once Trump captured the GOP and ascended to the presidency in 2017, that bubble served him and his interests. Within it, for example, his supporters were convinced by a sprawling conspiracy theory portraying the then-president as the victim of a shadowy “deep state” cabal that justified vast retribution.

The January 6 insurrection presented Trump’s propagandists with a crossroads. Rupert Murdoch, whose media empire includes right-wing bastions like Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and New York Post, privately sought for him to become a “non person.” But Tucker Carlson and his allies at Fox and elsewhere instead went to work creating a counternarrative in which Trump was blameless. People who knew better either played along or actively participated in the whitewashing of that day.

Trump’s various indictments for a host of crimes provided additional hinge points. Right-wing media figures who could have used evidence of his abject criminality as a rationale for cutting him loose instead rallied to him and sought to delegitimize those seeking to bring him to justice.

The right-wing media bubble’s eagerness to excuse Trump’s actions gave him a dominant position in the Republican primary. As he romped to the nomination, his opponents complained that they were unable to gain traction because the party’s propaganda wing had united behind him.

Trump again became the nominee of one of the two major parties. He selected Ohio Sen. JD Vance, a Carlson favorite, as his running mate, and demonstrated the importance of the right-wing echo chamber by giving Carlson himself a prime-time speaking slot at the Republican National Convention.

With the general election set between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, right-wing propagandists went to work holding the GOP base together with a combination of grievance-mongering and silence.

They flooded the zone with a bogus narrative of “migrant crime” while ignoring evidence that violent crime was actually plummeting from its Trump-era high.

They instructed their audiences to treat immigrants as a scapegoat, falsely claiming that federal disaster aid desperately needed to respond to hurricanes had been siphoned off to benefit migrants and ginning up grotesque lies about Haitian immigrants eating pets.

They lashed out at the press, urging the Republican base to treat Trump’s poor showing in his debate against Harris as the result of media bias.

When an unprecedented string of former Republican officials and Trump’s own former administration aides came forward with dire warnings of what Trump did in his first term and could do in a second one, they hid the news from their audiences.

And they kept quiet on a host of unpopular aspects of Trump’s policy agenda, from Social Security to reproductive rights, while beating back burgeoning scandals over his alleged January 6 crimes, communications with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and a political event at Arlington National Cemetery.

Journalists and political strategists will spend the next weeks and months grappling for explanations as to how Trump returned to the White House. But without the support of the right-wing propaganda machine, he would not have been in position to sweep his party’s nomination in the first place — and in an evenly divided country amid a global anti-incumbent wave, that provided a strong position to win the presidency.

Now, the same propagandists who helped him back to power are poised to help him carry out his extreme agenda of destruction and retribution.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

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Smart. Sharp. Funny. Fearless

Happy Fourth! Pride In America Plunges Under Trump Presidency (Again)

GOP Senator: 'It Will Take A Miracle' To Pass Trump's Big Ugly Bill

Pardoned January 6 Defendant Wants His Child Porn Indictment Dismissed Too

MAGA Propaganda Machine Revived Trump -- And It's Still Poisoning America

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Former GOP Governor Warns Trump Bill Will Devastate Rural Health Care

Raging Musk Now Threatens Members Of Congress Who Support Trump Budget