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The Presidential Politics of the Autoworkers’ Strike

by www.nytimes.com Leave a Comment

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Although one major strike, against Hollywood studios, was finally resolved this past week, another, against U.S. vehicle makers, is expanding. The plight of the autoworkers has now become a major point of contention in the presidential race.

Jonathan Weisman, a political correspondent for The Times, explains why the strike could be an essential test along the road to the White House.

On today’s episode

Jonathan Weisman , a political correspondent for The New York Times.

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Jonathan Weisman

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Report: Elon Musk’s X/Twitter Slashes ‘Election Integrity’ Staff Numbers

by www.breitbart.com Leave a Comment

Around half of the “election integrity” team at X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, has been laid off, per reports, with Elon Musk agreeing that the team had in fact undermined election integrity.

Responding to news reports on X/Twitter about the drop in employee numbers at the election integrity department, Elon Musk responded:

“Oh you mean the “Election Integrity” Team that was undermining election integrity? Yeah, they’re gone.”

Oh you mean the “Election Integrity” Team that was undermining election integrity? Yeah, they’re gone.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 27, 2023

According to a report in the Information, X/Twitter had announced plans to expand its election integrity team ahead of 2024 — but a month after the announcement, the company cut its election integrity team by half instead.

Via the Information:

Elon Musk’s X, formerly known as Twitter, is cutting around half of the global team devoted to limiting disinformation and election fraud on the platform, including the head of the group, according to three people familiar with the situation.

The cuts come less than a month after the company said it would expand the team and as X faces renewed criticism from the European Commission over the volume of misinformation on its platform. Meantime, other social media companies are gearing up to deal with disinformation and artificial intelligence during next year’s presidential elections in the U.S.

“Election integrity” teams at major social media platforms, along with “trust and safety” departments, were cultivated by the censorship industry after 2016, and actively interfered in the 2020 election. Twitter, before it was bought and rebranded by Musk, censored then-president Donald Trump on numerous occasions in the runup to that election , citing “election integrity” as a pretext.

This practice — branding the censorship of a political candidate and interference in the election as “election integrity,” was a common rhetorical tactic used by Big Tech censors and their allies in NGOs, media companies, and the deep state in 2020.

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election. Follow him on Twitter @AllumBokhari .

The looming Supreme Court cases that could sway the 2024 election

by www.newsweek.com Leave a Comment

The Supreme Court returns on October 2 for a new term that may bring landmark decisions on abortion and transgender rights ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

Since Roe v. Wade was overturned in June, 2022, the court’s sharply divided opinion on abortion is likely to remain a major public focus in the next year.

The judges are set to decide on the availability of the abortion pill, mifepristone, which is used in more than half of all American abortions. With more than 600,000 abortions in America per year, mifepristone is used in over 300,000 of them—highlighting the high stakes in the Supreme Court decision.

The court’s new term lasts until the first Monday in October, 2024. As it generally releases the majority of its decisions in mid-June, its rulings will be very much alive for voters in the run up to the election in November, 2024.

Danco Laboratories v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine

Danco Laboratories, the maker of Mifeprex, the branded name of mifepristone, petitioned the court this month to review a lower court’s limits on distributing mifepristone. Danco is strongly backed by the Department of Justice , which has submitted its own Supreme Court brief in favor of easier distribution of the pill.

In a submission to the court on September 8, the DOJ claimed there were “serious legal errors” in the 5th Circuit’s decision to limit the availability of mifepristone.

That sets the stage for a possible final resolution of the issue—with a Supreme Court decision likely by next summer.

In a separate submission, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote that the lower court decision marked the first time a court has ever second-guessed the expert judgment of the Food and Drug Administration in approving a drug.

Unless the lower court decision was reversed, it “would impose grave harms on the government, mifepristone’s sponsors, women seeking medication abortions, and the public,” she wrote.

Ryan Stitzlein, Vice President of Political and Government Relations at the pro-choice group, Reproductive Freedom for All, told Newsweek that he wants healthcare providers to determine if mifepristone is safe, not lawyers.

“Mifepristone has been safely used for decades. In fact, it’s safer than Tylenol (paracetamol). No court has ever [previously] ordered the FDA to take a medication off the market because of their own judgment about the safety of the medication…This fight is long from over, and we thank the Biden-Harris administration for their commitment to keeping mifepristone available,” he said.

That view is strongly rejected by Carolyn McDonnell, litigation counsel for pro-life group, Americans United For Life.

She said that the FDA and Danco have challenged the Fifth Circuit’s decision “that reinstated safeguards for women and girls seeking chemical abortion drugs.”

“These safeguards include a follow-up visit to ensure a woman has not retained fetal tissue or suffered complications from taking the drugs,” she said. “By asking for the removal of these safeguards, the petitioners are pursuing a radical abortion policy at the expense of the health and safety of women and girls.”

The Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade appeared to dent support for Republicans in 2022, which may have contributed to their lackluster performance in the midterms. The results prompted the party to launch a months-long investigation into how they can improve performance in upcoming elections. If the Supreme Court does limit the distribution of mifepristone, it could play badly with swing voters, while galvanizing support among pro-life voters.

The court could also agree to review conflicting appeals court decisions on medical treatment for transgendered minors.

Brandt et al v. Rutledge

Twenty-one states have bans on hormone therapy, surgery or other medical treatments for such minors, but some of the bans have been halted by lower courts.

In just one small part of the lower courts’ varying actions on the issue, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated Alabama’s ban on puberty blockers and hormones, while a district court judge blocked part of Georgia’s ban on most medical treatments for transgendered minors.

Federal attorney Colleen Kerwick told Newsweek that both cases question whether the Food and Drug Administration “has the final say on abortion rights and gender affirming treatments.”

She said these are “hot button topics” for the court to consider before the presidential election.

“The life of an unborn child is pitted against maternal rights; and children’s rights to decide their sex are pitted against parental rights to make decisions for them,” Kerwick said.

She said that the Supreme Court’s intervention “may serve as a big distraction to other political matters” before the election.

Top U.S. general feared Trump would attempt coup after election loss, new book says

by www.cbsnews.com Leave a Comment

A new book claims that General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the Pentagon was so worried about a coup attempt during the 2020 presidential election that top brass drew up contingency plans to stop a power grab by former President Trump.

As the former president pushed his narrative about a stolen election, the nation’s top military officer worried Mr. Trump or his supporters could attempt a coup, Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker write in the forthcoming book, “I Alone Can Fix It.”

“They may try, but they’re not going to f—ing succeed,” Milley is quoted as saying. “You can’t do this without the military. You can’t do this without the CIA and the FBI. We’re the guys with the guns.”

On Thursday, Mr. Trump fired back at the news, calling the claims “so ridiculous.”

“If I was going to do a coup, one of the last people I would want to do it with is General Mark Milley,” he added.

The authors say Milley also drew parallels between Mr. Trump’s claims of election fraud and Adolf Hitler’s rhetoric in Nazi Germany. He told aides: “This is a Reichstag moment. …The gospel of the Führer,” according to the book.

The authors also say Milley told staffers that listening to the president was like reading George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984”: “Lies are truth. Division is unity. Evil is good.”

At an event Thursday, Milley appeared to joke about the potential impact his alleged comments could have on his own career. After commenting that he wouldn’t be at the retirement of one of the event’s attendees, he said, “I may be at my own before that, but who knows?”

The book also claims Milley was not alone in his concerns. Top Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, told Milley to assure her that Mr. Trump would not use nuclear weapons, the book said.

When asked by CBS News if he had similar conversations with Milley, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said “I’m going to keep my conversations between myself and General Milley private.”

Milley himself was criticized for appearing with Mr. Trump on June 1, 2020, after protesters were forcefully cleared from Lafayette Square in front of the White House. Milley later apologized .

Kris Van Cleave

Kris Van Cleave is CBS News’ senior transportation and national correspondent based in Phoenix.

Mullen says reports post-election chaos within Trump White House are “incredibly disturbing”

by www.cbsnews.com Leave a Comment

Washington — Admiral Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Sunday that a reported episode contained in new books about former President Trump and his final months in the White House that described efforts for him to remain in power is “incredibly disturbing” and demonstrates the “chaotic environment” of the Trump administration.

Several of the recent books published about Mr. Trump, as well as an article in the New Yorker , detailed the concerns from General Mark Milley , the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the former president would use the military to stage a coup to deny President Biden the presidency or launch a strike on Iranian interests as a way to remain in power.

In an interview with “Face the Nation,” Mullen said he understands the reporting about the final weeks of the Trump administration to be “pretty accurate,” and described the time after the presidential election as “chaotic.”

“The two threats that you talked about, the external one, and whether or not we would commence some kind of combat or conflict with Iran, and then the internal one in terms of where it might go, particularly with respect to how the military would be used by President Trump to somehow validate that the election actually was a fraud and keep the president in power, I think that’s all very accurate and obviously incredibly disturbing, literally in every respect,” he told “Face the Nation.”

Mr. Trump spent the weeks after the presidential election spreading baseless claims the contest was rife with widespread voter fraud and alleging the election was rigged against him. But the former president has lost many legal battles filed in an effort to reverse the outcome of the presidential elections in several key battleground states, and federal cyber agencies declared the 2020 election to be the most secure in U.S. history.

Mr. Trump’s baseless claims about the 2020 election culminated in the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, when a mob of his supporters breached the building in an attempt to stop Congress from re-affirming Mr. Biden’s victory.

According to one book , “I Alone Can Fix It: Donald Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year,” written by a pair of Washington Post reporters, Milley compared the former president’s rhetoric to Adolf Hitler’s and had “a stomach-churning” feeling listening to Mr. Trump’s false allegations of election fraud.

Mullen said top military leaders like himself and Milley typically engage in “very tough, heated debates” with a president but carry out with a decision made by the commander-in-chief. But with regards to Mr. Trump, Milley acted correctly in pushing back, Mullen said.

“I think General Milley and others who’ve served over the last four years would tell you it’s been a very chaotic environment, very difficult to predict what was going to happen from day to day, and great concern with respect to the possibility of some of the orders that might come the military’s way,” he said. “General Milley, I thought, really did the right thing on both fronts, quite frankly. I don’t think he was alone with respect to Iran. But I think on the internal potential for a coup, really, really stood up, did the right thing, and I think made the case that he was the right officer to have in the right job at the right time in a very, very difficult, stunning and unprecedented situation.”

Mullen said that if Mr. Trump attempted to use the U.S. military to remain in power, Milley and other military leaders would have been forced to resign.

“That rubs up or actually it’s contrary to the Constitution, which is what the military serves, as opposed to the president, and could be seen as an illegal, immoral or unethical order, in which case, you know, General Milley and the rest of the military leadership, the other four stars, in my view, would be would be required to either resist or if they’re unable to resist, resign,” he said.

While Mullen not only had concerns about the military being politicized during the Trump administration, he said he continues to harbor those fears today.

“The political environment is so intense and so divided and we need to work hard to make sure the military doesn’t become part of what is politicized in this country,” he said.