We begin today with Aaron Blake of CNN reporting that the lead Republican sponsor for the Epstein files discharge petition, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, is aiming to attain a presidential veto-proof majority of House members to vote for the petition when the vote is taken (possibly this coming Tuesday).
The lead GOP co-sponsor of the discharge petition, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, isn’t exactly lowering expectations...He has set a threshold for success at two-thirds of the House, or nearly 290 votes, if all members are present.That’s the point at which enough members support the measure that it could overcome a presidential veto. [...]
It would require about 75 out of the 219 House Republicans, if every Democrat voted in favor.
Several Republicans have already said they will vote for the bill, despite not having supported Massie’s discharge petition. (Only four Republicans signed the petition.)
And we’re also seeing how this all could start to register in the Senate, with Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana quickly signaling Thursday that the GOP should just go for full transparency. Kennedy had previously voted against an early effort by Senate Democrats to force the release of the files. [...]
GOP leadership...has reason to try and limit defections, because of the level of pressure it could apply to the Senate.
But on the other side are plenty of dynamics pressuring members to vote for the bill.
The Chicago Sun-Times investigative team of Chip Mitchell, Tom Schuba, Sophie Sherry, Alden Loury, and Frank Main look into the risky tactics that federal agents have been taking during Operation Midway Blitz.
Over the past three months, immigration agents wearing masks and military-style garb have crisscrossed the Chicago area, from the diverse Far South Side to the tony north suburbs. They’ve arrested people without legal status and occasionally U.S. citizens as well.
Two people have been shot, one fatally. Rubber pellets and pepper balls have often been fired into crowds. And neighborhoods have been enveloped in clouds of noxious gas from canisters, tossed by federal agents, that have sickened residents and police officers, too.
Agents have been involved in eight car chases and used force in at least 76 incidents, according to a WBEZ and Sun-Times review of hundreds of court documents, videos and news reports. The examination focused on 18 types of force and also vehicle chases and collisions from Sept. 8 through Nov. 10 in the Chicago area, including northwest Indiana.
Experts say those tactics often conflict with professional policing practices, heighten safety risks, erode public confidence in police officers and discourage people from cooperating with them.
Trump’s dangerous troupe of ICE and Border Patrol agents have moved on to Charlotte, North Carolina and a Charlotte pastor, Kate Murphy, writes for The Charlotte Observer, reminding Charlotte-area church folks of what the Bible actually says about treatment of foreigners, strangers, and immigrants.
The Bible is very clear about the obligation people of faith have toward foreigners and neighbors. The Hebrew Bible is full of commands to show justice and mercy to immigrants. In Leviticus, Deuteronomy and Exodus we find requirements that “The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself because you were foreigners in Egypt.” In his letter to the Galatians, the Apostle Paul writes that “the entire law is fulfilled in the keeping of this one commandment, love your neighbor as yourself.” And in the gospel of Luke, a lawyer asks Jesus to clarify “who is my neighbor,” no doubt hoping to precisely differentiate between people who must be loved and who can be regarded with cruelty or indifference. In response, Jesus tells a story of a Good Samaritan — a foreigner — who stops to show mercy to a stranger who’s been attacked and beaten on the street.
The message is clear, we are a good neighbor when we show mercy. And our neighbor is the least fortunate person we know.
In the coming weeks, many of us may find ourselves living out the parable of the Good Samaritan. Some of us may be ambushed and attacked. Some of us may cross to the other side of the street and carry on with our day pretending that the misery we witness has nothing to do with us. And some of us may take great risks and pay a heavy price to come to the aid of the vulnerable. Preachers like me often preach about the joy of salvation, and those are faithful sermons. But sometimes we aren’t honest enough about the price we must pay. Salvation is free, yes. But it costs us everything. The man found the treasure, but then he had to sell all he had to buy the field before he could possess it. Federal agents may be about to descend on our city to attack our neighbors, native and foreign born. Any preacher who tells you God doesn’t care if you intervene is lying to you.
David Smith of The Guardian sees a rise in the number of white clergy candidates running for elected office...as Democrats.
He grew up on a farm in Indiana, the son of a factory worker and eldest of five children. He studied at Liberty, a Christian university founded by the conservative pastor and televangelist Jerry Falwell, and recalls wearing a T-shirt expressing opposition to Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.
Two decades later, Justin Douglas is running for the US Congress – as a Democrat.
He is among
around 30 Christian white clergy – pastors, seminary students and other faith leaders
– known to be potential Democratic candidates in next year’s midterm elections, including a dozen who are already in the race. While stressing the separation of church and state, many say that on a personal level their faith is calling them into the political arena. [...]
“...I...think the stereotypes of Republicans being pro-faith are bullshit too. We’re seeing a current administration bastardise faith almost every day. They used the Lord’s Prayer in a propaganda video for what they’re now calling the Department of War. That should have had every single evangelical’s bells and whistles and alarms going off in their head: this is sacrilegious.
José Luis Ávila of El Pais in English reports that the Trump regime will begin to deny visa applicants with certain health issues like heart disease, cancer, and diabetes.
The new guidance, which will be implemented starting in January 2026, was published in a cable sent by the State Department to embassy and consulate officials around the world in early November. The new rules require that the immigrant’s health and certain medical conditions — including cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, cancer, diabetes, metabolic and neurological diseases, and mental disorders — be taken into account, as these may require medical care worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Immigrants applying for a visa to live permanently in the United States must undergo a medical examination conducted by a government-approved healthcare professional. All applicants are tested for infectious diseases, such as tuberculosis, and are required to complete a form declaring any history of drug or alcohol use, mental health problems, or violence. They must also indicate whether they have received vaccinations to protect against infectious diseases such as measles, polio, and hepatitis B.
The new directive not only significantly expands the list of medical conditions to be considered, but also grants immigration officials greater power to accept or deny visas based solely on the applicant’s health status and their ability to afford medical treatment without government assistance. “Does the applicant have adequate financial resources to cover the costs of such care over his entire expected lifespan without seeking public cash assistance or long-term institutionalization at government expense?” the cable asks.
Clayton Dalton of The New Yorker cites research that shows that the aftereffects of disasters like hurricanes are extremely long-lasting and reach into every area of life.
When these storms come, we tend to think of their impacts in physical and immediate terms. Rachelle Salnave, a filmmaker in Haiti, sent me videos of a piece of the Route Nationale, the country’s main transportation artery, collapsing like a glacier into a roiling, swollen river. Western Jamaica was “just devastated,” George Hernandez Mejia, a director of a community relief organization, told me from Kingston. He sent me a video of what looked like acres of swift-moving flood waters, studded with dead trees. Black River, which is home to the only hospital in St. Elizabeth Parish, had been “utterly levelled,” he added. The death toll across the region was seventy-five, according to Hernandez Mejia.
But research increasingly shows that the aftereffects of disasters last longer, and extend to more domains of our lives, than official death tolls can capture. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (noaa), the average tropical cyclone, a category that encompasses hurricanes and tropical storms, causes twenty-four deaths; most of them tend to be due to drownings or physical trauma. But, in 2021, a team led by Robbie M. Parks, an epidemiologist at Columbia, studied Medicare data from seventy million hospital visits across nearly a thousand counties affected by tropical cyclones. He told me that many of a hurricane’s health effects come from “a panoply of hazards” that are not normally associated with storms. In the counties studied, admissions for cardiovascular disease, infections, and injuries went up; in the week after a storm, respiratory disease spiked more than anything else. Even hospitalizations for cancer and dementia became more common.
Parks’s team estimated that, among Medicare patients alone, tropical cyclones are associated with nearly seventeen thousand excess hospitalizations per decade in the United States. “It’s shocking, to be honest,” Parks told me. He sees each hurricane as a profound disruption to affected communities. “Once the water subsides, it becomes a huge, invisible burden,” he said. The hazards extend beyond rain, flooding, or wind. “They’re existential,” he said. “They pull at every element of the fabric of society.”
I talked to a few long-time residents of New Orleans at the 2018 Netroots conference who still had various types of issues dealing with Hurricane Katrina.
A little bit before 2005, Pliny the Younger wrote to the Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus that “my shocked soil recoils” at the memory of the eruption of Vesuvius ~25 years after he witnessed the eruption of the volcano that destroyed two cities and caused the death of his uncle.
Finally today, Liam Scott of Columbia journalism Review interviews Talking Points Memo founder Josh Marshall about the Silver Jubilee of TPM, which Marshall affectionately calls “a tabloid for smart people.”
SCOTT: How has TPM changed over the past quarter century, and how has it stayed the same?
MARSHALL: Needless to say, a lot has changed. There was basically a four- or five-year period where it was just me writing constantly, and that was what it was. I had no idea what I was setting up in the very beginning, but I had a certain way that I wanted to cover the news, with a certain sensibility and a certain candor. We’ve stayed true to that. I describe TPM as a tabloid for smart people. I wanted to punch you in the face with headlines that are edgy and over the top and make clear that political news is not like eating your wheat germ or having a lot of fiber in your diet. It is a spectacle, and it is fun, in a way, and it is something to be excited about. We want you to be engrossed by it, to be entertained by it. We also want you to think what we’re talking about is important, but we want those things together. [...]
SCOTT: It’s really noteworthy that TPM is still independent. Among TPM’s peers, neither Slate nor Salon is independently owned.
MARSHALL: I don’t mean this in a valorizing sense, but we have always been pretty unique in that there aren’t many companies like us. I mean that just in a very operational sense of scale, access to capital, not having a larger corporation behind us—something that in an earlier period sometimes felt like a big disadvantage.
More recently, it feels like a big advantage. There’s no one who can do to us what Condé Nast just did to Teen Vogue. And obviously, this is just the most recent example. Salon and Slateand those kinds of quasi-niche digital publications that go way back—I definitely think about those as our peers. But Slate started off as a mini-project of Microsoft, one of the biggest companies in the world, and Salon had its own hotshot Silicon Valley phase. Throughout TPM’s history, we’ve always been something like Slate and Salon, and we’ve always been a little like traditional small political magazines. When we were more in the advertising world, our competitors were places like Politico. So we’ve always had several peer sets, and yet we’re pretty unique.
Happy Belated Birthday to TPM!
Everyone have the best possible day that you can!
