WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) — President Joe Biden’s choice to run the Federal Aviation Administration has withdrawn his nomination, a setback for the administration that comes after Denver International Airport CEO Phillip Washington failed to gain enough support in the closely divided Senate.
Washington’s withdrawal was confirmed Saturday night by a person familiar with the situation who insisted on anonymity to discuss the matter. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Republicans were united in opposition to Washington, calling him unqualified because of limited aviation experience. Democrats and allied independents still might have pushed the nomination through, but key senators on their side balked at supporting Biden’s pick.
Washington’s fate appeared settled when Senate Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., abruptly called off a scheduled vote last Wednesday — a sign that she lacked enough votes to move the nomination out of committee. She said some senators wanted more information about Washington.
FILE – Phillip Washington, the nominee to become administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, testifies before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee at the Capitol in Washington, March 1, 2023.
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who was a Democrat until switching to independent in December, and moderate Democrat Jon Tester of Montana declined to say how they would have voted. Before the White House announces a new nominee, it likely will want assurances of support from Sinema, Tester and other moderates.
The FAA has lacked a Senate-confirmed administrator since March 2022. The agency is trying to reassure Americans that air travel is safe despite a surge in close calls between planes this year. It is also struggling with aging technology that failed in January, briefly canceling all takeoffs around the country. And it is still trying to repair its reputation after approving Boeing planes that crashed in 2018 and 2019.
Washington ran transit agencies in Denver and Los Angeles, but his only aviation-related experience is serving as CEO of the Denver airport for less than two years. He has strong ties to the administration, however — he led Biden’s 2020 transition team for the Transportation Department, which includes the FAA.
Biden nominated Washington last July, but he didn’t get a committee hearing for eight months. Republicans attacked his resume and seized on disclosures that his name appeared in search warrants related to a corruption investigation in Los Angeles.
Washington said he did nothing wrong and had not been contacted by law enforcement. The agency is being led by an acting administrator, Billy Nolen, a pilot who has held safety jobs at three airlines and the FAA. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who led opposition to Washington, said Nolen could win bipartisan support.
Ruben Gallego officially launched his highly anticipated bid for Kyrsten Sinema’s Senate seat Monday, setting up what will likely be a very contentious battle to represent Arizona in the upper chamber. A Gallego Senate bid wasn’t a question of if but when as the congressman has not so quietly built up a campaign team, which includes some of the same faces behind Raphael Warnock,John Fetterman, and Mark Kelly’s campaigns.
And he’s been very public about his distaste for Sinema, most recently after she spent MLK weekend rubbing elbows with power brokers at the annual Davos World Economic Forum in the Swiss Alps, instead of in Arizona. In an interview with Vanity Fair, Gallego dismissed Sinema as “tone deaf” and referred to her more headline-grabbing moments as “tacky” “performance art.” These aspersions Gallego cast last week are likely something of an amuse-bouche to his Senate campaign launch. “The rich and the powerful, they don’t need more advocates,” Gallego said in a video announcing his campaign, which made its way around social media Monday morning. “It’s the people that are still trying to decide between groceries and utilities that need a fighter for them.”
Gallego announced his bid with what appeared to be a veiled punch at Sinema. “We could argue different ways about how to do it, but at the core, if you’re more likely to be meeting with the powerful than the powerless, you’re doing this job incorrectly,” the congressman said in the video, seemingly a nod not only to Sinema’s Davos appearance, but her stand against raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans during Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act deliberations. “I’m sorry that politicians have let you down, but I’m going to change that.”
Yet it’s still a bit of an open question what kind of tone Gallego will strike over the course of the next year and a half; will he run a bitter race against the sitting senator? Speaking with Vanity Fair last week, Gallego gave a little window into his thinking: “There are a lot of reasons why the Democrats won in Arizona in 2022,” Gallego said. “But I will say, the one thing, the underlying thing that people aren’t pointing out is that all the nice people won their elections.” In his estimation, Arizonans don’t have an appetite for the brashness of TV newscaster turned MAGA darling Kari Lake (who is being floated as a possible Republican candidate), or Sinema’s theatrical thumbs-down on raising the minimum wage. “The harsh candidates, the candidates who were kind of playing cynical politics or just in general being harsh to voters, harsh to whoever—lost,” he said.
The ground is fertile in Arizona for a Senate showdown. Republicans still see Arizona as a top target, and a pathway back to the Senate majority—particularly given Sinema’s flagging popularity in the state. The stakes have only been compounded by Sinema’s decision to leave the Democratic Party and register as an independent. Early polls indicate the sitting Democrat turned independent could prove to be a spoiler for her former colleagues. A recent poll from Public Policy Polling showed Sinema with just 13% of the vote in a three-way race; Gallego and failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Lake, who received 40% and 41%, respectively. (Lake has denied any plans for a Senate bid. Sinema’s office did not respond to a request for comment and Sinema has not said whether or not she will run.)
Should Sinema run, Gallego will have to curb the number of Democrats and independent voters that defect to the incumbent. This weekend, according to an email to supporters, Gallego will appear at a string of rallies across Arizona in his newfound role as Senate hopeful. He is scheduled to appear in Tucson, Phoenix, Flagstaff, and Pinal County.
This is an opinion editorial by Level39, a researcher focused on Bitcoin, technology, history, ethics and energy.
On December 14, the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing & Urban Affairs received inaccurate testimony regarding Bitcoin from actor Ben McKenzie and Professor Hillary J. Allen. The hearing, entitled “Crypto Crash: Why the FTX Bubble Burst and Harm to Consumers,” had all the markings of political theater and provided a stage to misinform senators and the public. It coincided with Elizabeth Warren’s new financial surveillance bill, which is a disaster for privacy and civil liberties. On December 18, the Senate Banking Committee Chair Senator Sherrod Brown divulged on “Meet The Press” that the hearing was intended to “educate the public” on the dangers of cryptocurrencies and floated the idea of banning them altogether.
Mr. McKenzie Goes To Washington
Actor Ben McKenzie, who has starred in “The O.C.,” “Gotham” and “Southland,” lacks the qualifications and expertise one would expect for being called before the U.S. Senate Banking Committee to testify on the inner workings of financial technology. It should therefore come as no surprise that he made basic errors in his testimony, and could have been avoided altogether had witnesses with actual expertise been called. According to Mr. McKenzie:
“Bitcoin cannot work as a medium of exchange because it cannot scale. The Bitcoin network can only process 5 to 7 transactions a second. By comparison, Visa can handle tens of thousands. To facilitate that relatively trivial amount of transactions, Bitcoin uses an enormous amount of energy. In 2021, Bitcoin consumed 134 TWh in total, comparable to the electrical energy consumed by the country of Argentina. Bitcoin simply cannot ever work at scale as a medium of exchange.
McKenzie’s testimony leaves one with the impression that he intentionally sought out the most biased and unreliable sources to confirm his own predetermined conclusions. Unfortunately, it was false information.
In technical terms, McKenzie conflated Visa’s transaction network with Bitcoin’s final settlement network, to make the illogical claim that Bitcoin cannot scale. This is a novice mistake. One could use the same faulty logic to make the erroneous claim that millions of retail payments within the banking system should be impossible because banks typically wait until the end of the business day to settle funds with each other. That, of course, is not true, as gross settlement is precisely how high-volume retail payments are batched between banks.
Visa is a credit-based transaction network. It’s not a financial institution, so it does not actually transfer money and cannot perform final settlement like Bitcoin can. Visa is effectively an IT company that informs its member banks how to clear and perform gross settlement with each other during business hours. If you’ve ever waited a few days for a check to clear, you know that payments between two bank accounts are not instantaneous. Credit card transactions take one to three days to post. And 90 to120 days to settle.
The Visa system works well and offers services such as risk assessment, fraud prevention and clawbacks, but can incur high fees from the banks and intermediaries along the way. Member banks aren’t actually sending each other tens of thousands of payments every second. Instead, they batch millions of transactions together into a small number of final settlement payments. The settlements are typically routed through lower-volume real-time gross settlement (RTGS) networks operated by central banks, such as Fedwire in the U.S. or TARGET2 in the EU.
Bitcoin and Fedwire can perform about the same number of transactions per year. In December of 2020, Bitcoin performed 26 million transfers (counting multiple outputs) across 9.6 million transactions, while Fedwire settled 18 million transactions during the same time period. Just as Visa operates on transactional layers that batch transactions into gross settlement layers, Bitcoin is designed to scale in a similar manner.
Bitcoin’s Lightning Network was formally theorized as a scaling solution at MIT in 2016 and today is a burgeoning Layer 2 open payments protocol, layered on top of Bitcoin. The Lightning Network enables instant payments, and micropayments down to a fraction of a penny, and can scale up to the entire world. Micropayments alone could change e-commerce and the internet itself as we know it. Imagine machines or people streaming fractions of pennies for content or APIs and you can already begin to see a new future for the internet emerging. Traditional finance simply cannot achieve this.
The Lightning Network allows high throughput Layer 3 retail payment apps and services such as Cash App, Strike and many other apps to efficiently batch transactions into Bitcoin’s “blocks” for final settlement. Services on Layer 3 can offer the same protections we are used to in the legacy financial system, but anyone can freely access Bitcoin’s Layer 2 or Layer 1 whenever they want.
“While it would require time and investment, Visa’s payment network could sit on top of the bitcoin network to fulfill payments much the same way it sits on top of the existing banking system.”
There is no doubt that the larger cryptocurrency industry has become rife with fraud, scams and deception and it’s commendable that McKenzie makes an effort to warn the public about those dangers. However, in his haste to condemn the entire industry, he failed to fundamentally understand what sets Bitcoin apart from the seemingly endless “crypto” scams and fraud that have sprung up around Satoshi Nakamoto’s invention.
Bitcoin’s Lightning Network has a theoretical throughput of 40 million transactions per second. Just as the internet took more than a generation to achieve today’s levels of connectivity and reach, the Lightning Network would need time to grow its liquidity for it to achieve this theoretical maximum throughput. The performance of the Lightning Network is already astounding and is faster than traditional contactless payments. Thus, the testimony McKenzie provided to the U.S. Senate Banking Committee that, “Bitcoin simply cannot ever work at scale as a medium of exchange” was not only misleading, it was false.
McKenzie, who after getting high one evening decided to write a book on the rampant fraud in the crypto industry, has since begun a collaboration with journalist Jacob Silverman on the endeavor. McKenzie earned his bachelor of arts degree from the University of Virginia in 2001, majoring in foreign affairs and economics. That the U.S. Senate Banking Committee felt that an actor with an atrophied undergraduate degree in economics would somehow make an expert witness for a particularly complicated financial innovation suggests that the hearing was solely intended as political theater.
Senators Regurgitate Ben McKenzie’s Fallacious Testimony
When it was Senator Mark Warner’s turn to ask questions, he remarked:
“I do think it’s curious that China made the decision to basically take that kind of risk, to ban crypto, because of their, at least, risk/reward analysis… The clunkiness of the technology behind Bitcoin, it could never go to scale no matter what! If you can only do 5 or 6 transactions per second, that is not a scalable tool and obviously a technology at a power and environmental cost. It just doesn’t make sense to me.”
Ignoring for a moment that Senator Warner thought it was “curious” that an authoritarian country made the risk/reward calculation to ban free speech of code and software — which is protected under the First Amendment — McKenzie’s false testimony had misinformed the senator into thinking that Bitcoin cannot scale when it is in fact already rapidly scaling.
SMITH: As I understand it, crypto mining is built on a process that becomes more and more energy intensive, over time. Is that correct?
MCKENZIE: Yes.
SMITH: So, it’s inherently inefficient. Is that correct?
MCKENZIE: The technology is bad.
SMITH: And so, where is the benefit of this kind of innovation? How should we think about the impacts when it comes to the climate and energy impacts? Because when crypto mines are located in communities, those communities often see their energy prices go up — their energy rates go up — is that correct?
MCKENZIE: That’s right. I visited the largest crypto mine in the country, Whinstone, which is in Rockdale, Texas, just outside of my hometown of Austin, Texas. Local citizens are upset. It raises the cost of electricity for all citizens. And it also uses an enormous amount of energy. It took over a former Alcoa aluminum smelting plant that had been abandoned and now we are using it to mine ephemeral digital assets of no productive value.
While it’s convenient that McKenzie just happened to have visited a mining operation and could provide Smith with the exact answers that confirmed her biases, unfortunately he has zero expertise on energy markets, demand response programs, power engineering or mining and has no qualifications to inform congress or policy on the matter.
The idea that Bitcoin mining is an “inefficient” technology and therefore needs the government to reign it in is nonsensical. If it were as inefficient as claimed, there would be no need to stop it, since more efficient technologies would be able to outcompete it and easily replace it. This is precisely the reason we have markets — to let the most efficient and cheapest technologies win over the inefficient and expensive technologies that will fail. Those who are willing to take the risk on those technologies are either rewarded or bear the consequences.
McKenzie doesn’t divulge that ERCOT, the Texas grid, is isolated and therefore is required to have excess dispatchable energy for extreme weather events. That excess energy needs to be consumed by large scale flexible customers who are willing to pay for it is an open market when it’s not needed. Buying energy that would otherwise go wasted, for computation, keeps dispatchable energy profitable and officially classifies Bitcoin miners as beneficial large flexible loads (LFLs) by the ERCOT grid. A recent ERCOT study showed miners are essential to its demand response strategy.
As demand response consumers, miners purchase wholesale energy in advance and buy private insurance products that incentivize them to turn off their machines when prices rise during periods of increased consumer demand — thus balancing the grid and its prices, while increasing grid reliability. The idea that McKenzie or any critic could isolate escalating power prices to a single consumer in a deregulated wholesale market is extremely dubious. Such a claim ignores the recent tripling in natural gas prices, as well as the recent build out of over 10 gigawatts of solar power and Texas load growth from non-mining customers, such as the Tesla Gigafactory.
Senator Smith and McKenzie’s suggestion that mining becomes “more and more energy intensive over time” is highly misleading and shows a lack of understanding of the technology. Like any publicly-traded commodity such as bitcoin, the energy required is economically linked to the public’s demand for its declining issuance, and unfolds in a highly-competitive open energy market. There is nothing about the technology that requires the consumption of more and more energy over time. Bitcoin’s four-year “halving” cycle reduces the rewards that miners receive to purchase energy. In fact, Bitcoin’s critics claim that miners may not be able to afford to buy as much energy, decades from now — a topic which is hotly debated. Eventually, critics will need to get their stories straight. Either miners will have the money to purchase energy in the future or they won’t, however, both outcomes cannot be true.
The Senate’s thespians don’t care that Bitcoin mitigates waste methane emissions from oil and natural gas exploration where there is no other use for waste CH₄, which would otherwise be vented into the atmosphere and would heavily contribute to warming forces. To them, Bitcoin is “bad” simply because people having the voluntaryoption for a digital sound money, without counterparty risk, threatens their politics.
“It’s not decentralized… Bitcoin is controlled by a few core software developers — fewer than 10. And they can make changes to the software and that software is implemented by mining pools and there’s just a few of them.”
Allen’s assertion is factually incorrect and shows a fundamentally flawed understanding of how Bitcoin works and why it is valued for being extremely difficult to change. Even if you believe that the project’s maintainers, who have the elevated commit and publishing privileges, could persuade the largest mining pools to support their own whims, they would still need to persuade a majority of the world’s independent miners to stay loyal to existing mining pools. Creating new competing pools is trivial and any software update supported by pools that miners disagreed with could easily be avoided by creating new pools for defectors to join.
And what if miners unanimously supported a software update that users didn’t want? In 2017, 83% of the global hash rate attempted to force an update to increase Bitcoin’s block size and failed because the users, who are actually responsible for propagating and interacting with the Bitcoin network through their own full nodes, refused to install the new software. The Bitcoin network simply doesn’t exist or propagate without the user nodes, so miners defecting to their own network is pointless unless they convince users to come with them. The history of this critical test for Bitcoin was carefully documented by Jonathan Bier in his book, “The Blocksize War: The Battle Over Who Controls Bitcoin’s Protocol Rules.”
Running a full node is fairly easy. At minimum, all it takes is a hard drive, a Raspberry Pi and an internet connection. Since Bitcoin updates with soft forks (backwards-compatible software updates), users who find themselves in the minority always have the right to dissent and oppose contentious updates by just continuing to run the software with the rules they signed up for. Additionally, even if the entire Bitcoin Core team went rogue, users would be able to install alternative competing clients in their nodes, without forking the blockchain.
Other so-called innovative “crypto” projects use coercive techniques to force updates while they try to rapidly innovate like software companies. No other project offers the kind of user rights that Bitcoin offers. As such, there is no incentive for Bitcoin users to run a fork that fundamentally changes Bitcoin’s properties — its resistance to change is the core value proposition that its users are drawn to and demand.
Is it plausible that Bitcoin could be tested again and fail the same test in the future? Of course. But for Professor Allen to ignore the fact that users ultimately decide Bitcoin’s fate — as well as its well-documented history proving its resilience to unwanted changes from miners and developers — shows Allen was either woefully unprepared to be discussing such technical aspects of Bitcoin or is intentionally misleading senators and the public with her testimony.
A Performance Of Misinformation
If anything was evident from the hearing, it was that there was zero effort to ascertain nuance or truth — the hearing was political theater. Unfortunately, having an undergraduate degree in economics, or reaching the higher echelons of Bitcoin-resenting academia, does not automatically qualify one to have the expertise to inform the Senate on how Bitcoin works. If only it were that easy. Understanding Bitcoin requires an open, multidisciplinary mind and hours upon hours of research just to begin scratching the surface. Perhaps Kanye West’s recent public statement on Bitcoin could have gone a long way for McKenzie and Allen.
“As far as Bitcoin, I’m just not knowledgeable enough to speak on that subject.”
Warren’s rapid-fire question and answer session with Allen showed Allen nervously reading, verbatim, pre-scripted answers to Warren’s questions. McKenzie on the other hand had the discipline to memorize and perform his lines with poise and confidence. If only they each had the expertise required to address the U.S Senate Banking Committee on Bitcoin — a technology that quite literally enables self custody and solves the breaches of trust that the hearing was ostensibly concerned with.
Whether the hearings participants realized they were being manipulated by politicians or not, participating in political theater means they are normalizing the loss of privacy rights as they lobby for legislation to limit the right to self custody digital property and one’s identity. Such action not only empowers governments to enact greater monitoring controls, install social credit systems and strip personal freedoms, but it also exposes consumers to the prying eyes of corporations and any hackers that can infiltrate highly-centralized data. Ironically, such restrictions will empower their political opponents when our political pendulums invariably swing in the other direction.
Meanwhile, Warren is headed in the opposite direction. She recently introduced a bipartisan bill with Senator Roger Marshall to aggressively close crypto money laundering loopholes by imposing Orwellian controls on all users. The bill seeks to make self-custody technology illegal — a dangerous policy that would expose Americans to mandated government surveillance and only increase the chances of the fraud that FTX committed against its users when funds were rehypothecated and stolen through their custodial platform. Stopping this kind of fraud was what the hearing was supposed to be about and is exactly the kind of protection that Bitcoin already empowers through self custody.
“Regardless, the good news is two-fold: Cryptocurrency-related crime is falling, and it still remains a small part of the overall cryptocurrency economy.”
However, this is not to say that crypto doesn’t have a problem with fraud. To Allen and McKenzie’s credit, 99.99% of the “crypto” market is indeed scams, and they should be commended for calling them out. Yet, to blindly call Satoshi Nakamoto’s invention a scam shows a lack of critical thinking and expertise. To attack Bitcoin — an open, global and neutral economic protocol layer for the internet with no issuer and no central control — simply because one does not like it or understand it, shows a lack of humility and unwillingness to recognize real-world benefits with an open mind.
If the U.S. Senate Banking Committee has any desire to preserve freedoms and keep the United States from falling behind other nations, it would do well to seek out actual experts who work in Bitcoin mining, energy markets and those who are using its layered payments architecture to build the next generation of commerce. Political theater will only cause the U.S. to fall further behind the rest of the world in all of these areas.
As politicians and organizers across the country battle ongoing abortion restrictions in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s demise, many are gearing up for the next fight in the war on reproductive justice: ensuring continued access to in vitro fertilization and other fertility treatments.
Democratic Sens. Tammy Duckworth (Ill.) and Patty Murray (Wash.) are anticipating that fight with the introduction of new legislation, the Right To Build Families Act of 2022. The bill, introduced in the Senate on Thursday morning, codifies protections for assisted reproductive technologies, including allowing patients to retain rights to their reproductive genetic material and protecting physicians who provide assisted fertility services. The legislation also seeks to allow the Department of Justice to pursue civil action against any state that attempts to restrict access to IVF and other fertility services.
“IVF advocates in this country today are publicly telling us, ‘We need this kind of legislation to be able to protect this,’” Murray told HuffPost by phone on Wednesday. “And here we are after the Dobbs decision where states are enacting laws and we have [anti-abortion] advocates who are now starting to talk, especially behind closed doors, about stopping the right for women and men to have IVF procedures done.”
Many people may not realize that attacks on a person’s right to abortion care also threaten a person’s right to choose to have children. Abortion care and fertility treatments like IVF are intricately linked because of how many Republican lawmakers are redefining when life begins.
IVF is a medical procedure in which an egg is fertilized by sperm outside the body and then implanted into the uterus. Sometimes, physicians will implant multiple fertilized eggs into the uterus to give the person a better chance at a successful pregnancy. Suppose this results in a multiple pregnancy (i.e., twins, triplets, etc.). In that case, people can choose a fetal reduction — lowering the number of fetuses and improving a person’s chance for a healthy pregnancy. More often, physicians will implant one fertilized egg, and if the patient becomes pregnant, they can choose to discard their other fertilized eggs or freeze them for possible future use. And usually, not all fertilized eggs are viable, leading physicians to discard some.
But many lawmakers and Catholic groups oppose IVF because they believe a fertilized egg is a human being or person. Discarding fertilized eggs is murder in the eyes of many anti-choice religious organizations, many of which are pushing to see their beliefs become law.
Lawmakers and anti-abortion advocates in Ohio, Virginiaand Texas are already discussing legislation that could potentially ban IVF. Tennessee lawmakers can be heard discussing their plans to roll back access to IVF and contraception in recently leaked audio between the anti-choice politicians and Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America.
“This is the part of the abortion debate that most Americans were unaware of until Roe v. Wade fell,” Duckworth said.
“This is the part of the abortion debate that most Americans were not aware of until Roe v. Wade fell.”
– Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.)
The legislation is personal for Duckworth, who conceived her two daughters using IVF. When Duckworth struggled with fertility, she went to her doctor to seek answers. The physician told her she was simply too old and would never get pregnant. Thankfully, she got a second opinion and discovered she was a prime candidate for IVF. Duckworth later realized that the first doctor didn’t tell her IVF was an option because the doctor worked at a Catholic hospital, which opposed any assisted fertility treatment.
“In my case, I had five fertilized eggs, and we discarded three because they were not viable. That is now potentially manslaughter in some of these states,” she said.
“I also have a fertilized egg that’s frozen,” Duckworth added. “My husband and I haven’t decided what we will do with it, but the head of the Texas Right to Life organization that wrote the bounty law for Texas has come out and specifically said he’s going after IVF next, and he wants control of the embryos.”
Duckworth and Murray worked together last year to pass the Veteran Families Health Services Act — similar legislation that repealed Veterans Affairs’ ban on IVF and further protected access to assisted reproductive technologies for veterans. Duckworth told HuffPost she believes the Right To Build Families Act has a better chance at passing the Senate because many Republicans are already on record voting in support of protecting fertility treatments for veterans.
Murray was more reticent about her Republican colleagues’ willingness to support the Right To Build Families Act, pointing to the fact that Democrats could not get any Republicans to co-sponsor the bill.
“I know that there are people out there who don’t want to be the public face of stopping IVF but certainly don’t mind when there’s some negotiation at the end of the day, taking it off the table,” Murray said.
“I’ve seen that with veterans, and I have no doubt that those people exist behind closed doors here today. We should not just assume that they’re not going to be active about this.”
As the Georgia runoff approaches, President Joe Biden and his predecessors have a lot to say about former NFL running back and Trump-backed candidate Herschel Walker before he faces Democratic incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock on Tuesday.
On Thursday at a rally in the Peach State, former President Barack Obama made fun of Walker’s strange comments last week regarding vampires and werewolves: “Since the last time I was here, Mr. Walker has been talking about issues of great importance to the people of Georgia, like whether it’s better to be a vampire or a werewolf. This is a debate that I must confess I once had myself—when I was 7.”
Twitter content
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
According to Politico, a person close to Walker’s campaign said that neither Trump nor Walker’s campaign seem to want Trump in Georgia. “We’re just trying to not rock the boat with any and all sides,” said the source. “We’re holding together a fragile coalition.”
Trump is probably not helping his case with his recent claims and decisions. Not only did he dine with antisemites last week, but he called to terminate the U.S. Constitution on Truth Social, once again citing 2020 election fraud claims. He wrote, “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” Trump’s claims came in the wake of “Twitter Files,” which allegedly documented how Twitter employees deliberated restricting the story surrounding Hunter Biden‘s laptop.
Regardless of the Georgia race’s outcome, the Senate will be controlled by the Democrats, as the Democrats have 50 seats after the November 8 midterm election—plus, a vote from Vice President Kamala Harris to break any ties.
Warnock also said the former running back “majors in lying,” emphasizing Walker’s falsehoods regarding his career in law enforcement and abortion stance. “My opponent lies about everything…He said he was a police officer. He’s not. He said he worked for the FBI. He did not. Said he graduated from the University of Georgia. He did not. Said he was valedictorian of his class. He was not…He said he had another business with 800 employees. It has eight.”
Meanwhile, Walker has called Warnock “Scooby-Doo” while offering up an impression of the cartoon, and has criticized the pastor regarding the Columbia Tower low-income apartment building in Atlanta, which is owned by Warnock’s church, as residents recently complained about unfair eviction notices.
“What he’s doing in this apartment building at Columbia Towers is not right,” Walker said recently at a suburban Atlanta campaign stop. “You shouldn’t put Jesus’ name on what you’re doing to people, and don’t put Martin Luther King name on it. … You’re not Jesus, and you’re not Dr. King.”
In the November 8 election, Warnock led Walker by 37,000 votes; however, the incumbent did not cross the 50% threshold necessary to secure the victory.
In a bipartisan response to Ticketmaster’s Taylor Swift ticket sale fiasco, Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) announced Tuesday that a Senate subcommittee will hold a hearing to appraise the lack of competition in the ticketing industry.
The hearing, which has not yet been scheduled, will take place before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights, which Klobuchar chairs and Lee serves on as a ranking member. The announcement comes a week after Ticketmaster, which controls the vast majority of ticket sales in the U.S., came under immense scrutiny for bungling its highly anticipated ticket sale for Swift’s upcoming stadium tour.
“Last week, the competition problem in ticketing markets was made painfully obvious when Ticketmaster’s website failed hundreds of thousands of fans hoping to purchase concert tickets,” Klobuchar said in a statement. “The high fees, site disruptions and cancellations that customers experienced shows how Ticketmaster’s dominant market position means the company does not face any pressure to continually innovate and improve.”
Lee added that “American consumers deserve the benefit of competition in every market, from grocery chains to concert venues,” and noted the importance of supporting “an entertainment industry already struggling to recover from pandemic lockdowns.”
In a statement responding to news of the forthcoming hearing, Ticketmaster defended itself, saying it “has a significant share of the primary ticketing services market because of the large gap that exists between the quality of the Ticketmaster system and the next best primary ticketing system.”
Much of the criticism of Ticketmaster over the past week focused on its 2010 merger with Live Nation, which led to the company controlling an estimated 70% of the ticketing market. Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) was among the first prominent voices to call out the issue amid the Swift ticket sale frenzy last Tuesday, tweeting: “Ticketmaster is a monopoly, [its] merger with LiveNation should never have been approved, and they need to be [reined] in. Break them up.”
Critics say the company’s apparent monopoly allowed it to get away with providing a subpar service rife with technical glitches that proved unable to meet customer demand. Many people frustrated by last week’s ticket-buying ordeal emphasized that Ticketmaster had approved a set number of customers to access Tuesday’s sale, and thus should have been adequately prepared to meet what it later called a “historically unprecedented demand.”
Instead, many of those customers were met with various error messages and hourslong wait times when they tried to make their purchases. Fans who couldn’t get through on Tuesday were let down again when Ticketmaster outright canceled its scheduled sale of more tickets later in the week.
Swift, one of the most popular recording artists of all time, eventually weighed in on the mess, telling fans she was disappointed in Ticketmaster, too.
“I’m not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could,” she said of the company. “It’s truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them.”
Incumbent Senator Mark Kelly has defeated Republican Blake Masters in the Arizona Senate race—a crucial win for Democrats who hope to maintain control of the upper chamber. After winning a special election last cycle to fill the remainder of late senator John McCain’s term, Kelly, a former astronaut and Naval aviator, will now serve his first full term.
With Kelly’s win in Arizona, Democrats are just one seat away from keeping their majority in the Senate, with all eyes toward Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada and Raphael Warnock in Georgia.
Arizona was never seen as a sure bet; the state has become a highly competitive swing state in recent years amid an influx of new residents in the state’s growing metropolitan areas. Still, Democrats running statewide face significant hurdles, with Republicans making up the state’s largest voting bloc.
Kelly came out on top thanks to a war chest in campaign funds; he raised more than $73 million, compared to just under $10 million for Masters, according to recent Federal Election Commission filings. Some Republican groups, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell‘s Senate Leadership Fund, cut spending in the race to shift resources to contests deemed more gettable for the GOP.
At roughly this time last year, Arizona was seen as one of the GOP’s top pickup opportunities in the 50-50 Senate, given the political and economic headwinds for Democrats. But Masters, a Peter Thiel protégé with zero political experience, proved to be a poor general election candidate. After surviving a bitter primary contest—thanks to an endorsement from Donald Trump and $14.5 million in funding from Thiel—Masters spent much of the general election backtracking from his past hardline positions, including his billing as a “100% pro-life” candidate.
In contrast, Kelly championed abortion rights throughout the general, making a campaign promise to codify abortion protections established by Roe v. Wade, the ruling struck down by the Supreme Court earlier this year. (Arizona’s current abortion laws ban most procedures from taking place after 15 weeks of pregnancy—a standard that Masters said he would support nationwide—while a a more stringent ban is being litigated in the state.)
On immigration, one of the GOP’s top rallying points in Arizona, Kelly positioned himself to the right of his party’s leadership. During the race’s only debate, he called for the Biden administration to heighten border security by renovating border fences and recruiting additional Border Patrol agents to Arizona.
PHOENIX (AP) — Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly won his bid for reelection Friday in the crucial swing state of Arizona, defeating Republican venture capitalist Blake Masters to put his party one victory away from clinching control of the chamber for the next two years of Joe Biden’s presidency.
With Vice President Kamala Harris’s tiebreaking vote, Democrats can retain control of the Senate by winning either the Nevada race, which remains too early to call, or next month’s runoff in Georgia. Republicans now must win both those races to take the majority.
“ Republican Senate nominee Blake Masters earned Donald Trump’s endorsement after claiming ‘Trump won in 2020’ but. under pressure during a debate last month, acknowledged he hadn’t seen evidence that election was rigged. He later resumed adherence to the false claim.”
The Arizona race is one of a handful of contests that Republicans targeted in their bid to take control of the 50-50 Senate. It was a test of the inroads that Kelly and other Democrats have made in a state once reliably dominated by the GOP. Kelly’s victory suggests Democratic success in Arizona was not an aberration during Donald Trump’s presidency.
Other Arizona contests, including the closely watched race for governor between Democrat Katie Hobbs and Republican Kari Lake, were too early to call Friday night.
Kelly, a former NASA astronaut who’s flown in space four times, is married to former U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords, who inspired the nation with her recovery from a gunshot wound to the head during an assassination attempt in 2011 that killed six people and injured 13. Kelly and Giffords went on to co-found a gun safety advocacy group.
Kelly’s victory in a 2020 special election spurred by the death of Republican Sen. John McCain gave Democrats both of Arizona’s Senate seats for the first time in 70 years. The shift was propelled by the state’s fast-changing demographics and the unpopularity of Trump.
Kelly’s 2022 campaign largely focused on his support for abortion rights, protecting Social Security, lowering drug prices and ensuring a stable water supply in the midst of a drought, which has curtailed Arizona’s cut of Colorado River water.
With President Joe Biden struggling with low approval ratings, Kelly distanced himself from the president, particularly on border security, and played down his Democratic affiliation amid angst about the state of the economy.
He also styled himself as an independent willing to buck his party, in the style of McCain.
Masters, an acolyte of billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel, tried to penetrate Kelly’s independent image, aligning him with the Biden administration’s approach to the U.S.-Mexico border and tamp down on rampant inflation.
Masters endeared himself to many GOP primary voters with his penchant for provocation and contrarian thinking. He called for privatizing Social Security, took a hard-line stance against abortion and promoted a racist theory popular with white nationalists that Democrats are seeking to use immigration to replace white people in America.
But after emerging bruised from a contentious primary, Masters struggled to raise money and was put on the defense over his controversial positions.
He earned Trump’s endorsement after claiming “Trump won in 2020,” but under pressure during a debate last month, he acknowledged he hasn’t seen evidence the election was rigged. He later doubled down on the false claim that Trump won.
After the primary, he scrubbed some of his more controversial positions from his website, but it wasn’t enough for the moderate swing voters who decided the election.
The results of pivotal races in Arizona and Nevada that could determine which party controls the Senate remain up in the air, and it could take several more days until there’s clarity on who won.
And that continued right through Election Day, with a party platter that referenced one of Oz’s most infamous campaign flubs.
Reporters at Fetterman’s election night event spotted a “crudité” spread:
That’s a reference to an infamous video Oz made in a supermarket complaining about prices as he pretended he was buying ingredients his wife wanted for a “crudité.”
Fetterman retweeted the video with a crudité correction.
“In PA we call this a… veggie tray,” he wrote.
But on election night, Fetterman’s campaign couldn’t help but break out the jokey C-word:
That wasn’t Oz’s only screwup in the video, He also botched the names of two regional supermarket chains by claiming he was in a “Wegner’s,” apparently a mangling of Wegmans with Redner’s.
He later claimed the mixup was because he was “exhausted” by his campaign effort.
“I’ve gotten my kids’ names wrong as well,” Oz told Newsmax. “I don’t think that’s a measure of someone’s ability to lead the commonwealth.”
Lt. Gov. John Fetterman (D) won Pennsylvania’s high-stakes Senate race Tuesday, defeating Republican nominee Mehmet Oz, according to the Associated Press, a significant victory as Democrats flip the seat held by retiring Republican Sen. Pat Toomey and vie to maintain control of the Senate.
Fetterman beat Oz by more than two points to flip the key Senate seat in favor of the Democrats.
Mark Makela/Getty Images
Key Facts
With 91% of the votes counted at around 2 a.m., Fetterman led Oz 49.9% to 47.7%, a lead of 113,036 votes.
Fetterman gave a speech thanking the people of Pennsylvania after several TV networks called the race for him, and tweeted: “I won’t let you down.”
Oz has yet to publicly concede the race.
Crucial Quote
“This race is for the future of every community across Pennsylvania,” Fetterman said after the race was called by multiple media outlets.
Key Background
The two candidates in one of the most closely watched toss-up races in the country could not have been further apart when it came to style and personality. Oz is a Republican TV celebrity and doctor who is worth over $100 million and didn’t even live in their state until December 2021. Fetterman, who sported a hooded sweatshirt and goatee on the campaign trail, was born and raised in West Reading, Pennsylvania, served as mayor of the struggling steel town of Braddock for 13 years before becoming lieutenant governor. He suffered a stroke days before the May primary that took him off the campaign trail for months and left him with auditory processing issues that affected his ability to communicate in interviews and during the candidates’ sole debate. Oz seized on his opponent’s health issues to cast him as unfit for office, while Fetterman described his struggles as a way to empathize with everyday Pennsylvanians. In the final days before the election, prominent players from both parties campaigned alongside the candidates in hopes of securing wins in a contest that will help determine which party controls the Senate. As former President Donald Trump rallied with Oz, on Saturday, President Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama campaigned with Fetterman.
Big Number
0.5. That’s the number of points Oz led the polls by heading into Election Day, according to FiveThirtyEight, representing more than a 10-point shift from Fetterman’s lead in mid-September.
The movement’s message to the U.S. Senate: “We demand Congress enact further legislation to fully protect students from school shootings — and to do it NOW.”
Press Release –
Sep 19, 2022
PORTLAND, Ore., September 19, 2022 (Newswire.com)
– 100 Percent of US strives to unite Americans around the urgent need to prevent school shootings. The campaign asks progressives, conservatives, and everyone in-between to acknowledge, “While we don’t agree on much, 100% of US agree kids should not be murdered at school.”
The campaign founder and mother, Mariah Gray, launched 100PercentofUS.com over the summer, as millions of parents prepared to send their kids back-to-school. “School shootings should not be a political issue. If folks from the entire political spectrum agree kids and teachers should not be murdered at school, then Congress has their marching orders—it’s time they devise and implement effective legislation to prevent 100% of school shootings across the country,” said Gray.
The backbone of the campaign is a promise not to discuss politics in order to maintain solidarity among participants. “Our campaign is not telling Congress how to stop school shootings, we’re telling them when to do it. We demand Congress enact further legislation to fully protect students from school shootings by a deadline of Nov. 1, 2022.”
100PercentofUS.com encourages participants to write letters to two key Senators urging Congress to take immediate action to prevent future school shootings. Letters should be mailed to majority leader and New York Senator Chuck Schumer, and Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, who serves as the minority leader of the United States Senate.
October 1st—the date on which participants should mail their letters is quickly approaching.
For more information or to download letter templates and get involved in the bipartisan movement, please visit 100PercentofUS.com.
About 100 Percent of US 100 Percent of US is a non-monetary, non-affiliated, grassroots movement comprised of Americans seeking action from our legislature on the issue of school shootings.
ARLINGTON, Va., April 4, 2022 (Newswire.com)
– The American COMPETES Act of 2022 was passed by the House of Representatives in February 2022 to cover scientific research, economic competitiveness and various other matters related to CREATING OPPORTUNITIES FOR MANUFACTURING, PRE-EMINENCE IN TECHNOLOGY AND ECONOMIC STRENGTH (COMPETES). After recent breakthroughs in the fusion energy industry, Kronos Fusion Energy highly encourages the support of this act.
On March 23, 2022, the US Senate voted 66-33 on a motion to proceed to consider this Bill. There is a very important Amendment for the fusion energy industry that was sponsored by three House members who are thought leaders in developing strategies to create high-paying American jobs for the fusion energy industry.
Priyanca Ford, founder of Kronos Fusion Energy Inc, urged the U.S. Senate to consider fusion energy to be a bipartisan issue, “Fusion Energy is the cleanest and most efficient energy source in the universe that will lead mankind to a new golden age. [Ford] urges the U.S. Senate to support the Fusion Energy Amendment and to pass the COMPETES Bill quickly, to help to jumpstart the American fusion energy industry’s quest to become the global leader in jobs creation for fusion energy”.
Representative Don Beyer (D-VA), the Chairman of the House Fusion Energy Caucus, Representative Lori Trahan (D-MA), the sponsor of the Fusion Amendment to the Energy Act of 2020 that created the fusion energy milestone program, and Representative Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Energy in the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology sponsored the Fusion Energy Amendment that will help to foster the rapid growth of the United States fusion energy industry.
Michael Pierce Hoban, managing partner at Kronos Fusion Energy Inc, commented on why this amendment is important to the U.S. fusion energy industry, “This amendment grows the funding for the Department of Energy’s proposed milestone-based public-private partnership program for fusion energy from $325 million over five years to $800 million. It also increases authorized funding for a new materials program from $200 million to $400 million over the coming five years.”
The U.S. Senate is now considering whether to concur with the house amendment on fusion energy and whether to pass the COMPETES Bill so that a completed bill can go to President Biden for signature.
Information on Kronos Fusion Energy can be found below.
Recognized as one of the top influencers of app culture in 2017, the app also adds representative scorecards and expanded calls to action.
Press Release –
updated: Jan 30, 2018
SEATTLE, Wash., January 30, 2018 (Newswire.com)
– Capitol Call, a non-partisan political activism app that takes the guesswork out of calling Congress and puts lobbying power in the hands of the people, has announced a series of major feature enhancements as it celebrates its one-year anniversary. In a continuing effort to increase political engagement and activism, the app has added new features to help users become more informed, stay motivated to act and have a convenient method to lobby their lawmakers for change.
App updates include:
We don’t have to be ‘somebody’ to get informed, pick up the phone, call our reps or cast our ballots.
Brandon Peterson, Founder, Capitol Call
News Feed feature, powered by NewsAPI.org, with the goal of encouraging users to create a balanced feed by including media bias data from AllSides.com. Additionally, it helps users escape their filter bubbles and see diverse perspectives by offering news from dozens of different sources.
Representative Scorecards to help users prepare for the 2018 midterms with ‘next election’ notices, details and text of bills their representatives have sponsored and stats on their elected official’s activities in Congress.
Expanded community-powered Action Center adding support for state and local campaigns to complement the existing nationally focused feed. Along with a new user interface for accessing state and local representatives, this feature brings advocacy tools to all levels of government and makes Capitol Call about more than lobbying Washington.
Building on a successful first year, which includes being named as one of 20 influencers in Apple’s 2017 App Culture Highlights and App of the Day, Seattle-based entrepreneur and founder Brandon Peterson, was inspired to create the app during last year’s Women’s March.
“When I started this project last year, I really didn’t know where it would go. I was inspired to action by the excitement of the Women’s March – but I really didn’t appreciate the power that one voice can have,” said Peterson. “I’m not ‘somebody.’ I don’t have a ‘following,’ or a position of authority, or a strong connection to the activism community. But I decided to take action. If I take anything from this experience it’s that you don’t have to be somebody to do something.”
“Many of the new features in this release, and those to follow, speak to that idea,” Peterson continued. “Informing people so they can feel confidence and gain perspective. Guiding people so they have direction and purpose. Empowering people to amplify their voices in Washington and in their communities. We don’t have to be ‘somebody’ to get informed, pick up the phone, call our reps or cast our ballots.”
Capitol Call is available to download for free in the Apple and Google Play stores. Download the app and learn more at: http://www.capitolcall.org.
Become an Action Center contributor at: http://outreach.capitolcall.org/contribute
###
Media Contact:
Brandon Peterson
Capitol Call, Founder
media@capitolcall.org
About Capitol Call
Capitol Call is the non-partisan mobile app that takes the guesswork out of calling Congress. Currently in the hands of 30,000 citizens, the app uses GPS to automatically determine the user’s representatives and provides sample phone scripts, allowing users to take immediate action. A true bootstrap startup, founder Brandon Peterson and his small team work nights and weekends, putting in personal time and dollars, to make it easier to track the causes you care about and let your voice be heard. Capitol Call was developed by Object Studio in Seattle, Washington USA. To learn more visit, www.capitolcall.org.
FILE – Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, speaks to the media during a press conference on the border, Sept. 27, 2023, on Capitol Hill in Washington. Democrats in search of flipping a U.S. Senate seat are watching Texas closely on Super Tuesday to see who voters nominate against Sen. Cruz.Mariam Zuhaib/AP
FILE – Sen. Roland Gutierrez, D-Texas, speaks during a news conference at a town square in Uvalde, Texas, June 2, 2022. Democrats in search of flipping a U.S. Senate seat are watching Texas closely on Super Tuesday to see who voters nominate against Republican Sen. Ted Cruz.Jae C. Hong/AP
FILE – Rep.-elect Colin Allred, D-Texas., arrives for orientation for new members of Congress, Nov. 13, 2018, in Washington. Democrats in search of flipping a U.S. Senate seat are watching Texas closely on Super Tuesday to see who voters nominate against Republican Sen. Ted Cruz.Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas has officially locked up the GOP nomination for a third term and awaits the winner of a wide field of Democratic challengers.
Cruz had no major primary opponent. Nine Democrats are running for the chance to unseat him in November, including U.S. Rep. Colin Allred and state Sen. Roland Gutierrez.
Democrats see Cruz’s seat as one of their best chances to flip a Senate seat this year even though a Democrat hasn’t won a statewide race in Texas in 30 years.
Article continues below this ad
Cruz’s last reelection campaign in 2018 ended in a narrow victory over Democrat Beto O’Rourke.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP’s earlier story follows below.
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Democrats in search of flipping a U.S. Senate seat were watching Texas closely on Super Tuesday to see who voters nominate against Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, whose underdog challengers have cast as vulnerable after a narrow margin of victory in 2018.
U.S. Rep. Colin Allred, a former NFL player and three-term congressman from Dallas, and state Sen. Roland Gutierrez have drawn most of the attention in a primary that again finds Texas Democrats in pursuit of a breakthrough candidate. No Democrat has won a statewide office in Texas in 30 years, the longest losing streak of its kind in the U.S.
Article continues below this ad
Despite that, Democrats believe Texas and Florida are their best shot for upsets in November as they try to preserve a slim 51-49 advantage in the Senate. That majority includes West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, who is not seeking reelection and whose seat is likely to flip Republican.
Seven other Democrats are also running in the Senate primary in Texas, including state Rep. Carl Sherman. The race heads to a May 28 runoff if no candidate wins a vote majority.
Allred, who would become Texas’ first Black senator if elected, has raised more than $21 million since getting in the race. That’s significantly more than his primary challengers, whom the civil rights lawyer has largely ignored during the primary while keeping his attacks focused on Cruz.
Allred, 40, made headlines in January when he was among 14 House Democrats who backed a Republican resolution in Congress that criticized President Joe Biden’s handling of the border. Gutierrez criticized Allred for the vote, accusing him of siding “with GOP extremists,” and Cruz spokesperson Macarena Martinez called the vote a “disingenuous attempt to posture on the border.”
Article continues below this ad
Allred said he did not agree with all the language in the resolution but said he wanted to see more urgency at the federal level when it comes to the border.
“For me, it was about sending a signal that, you know, what we have been doing is not working,” Allred said in an interview last week during early voting in Texas. “We have to change something.”
Cruz only narrowly beat Beto O’Rourke for reelection in 2018 by less than 3 percentage points. It was the closest Democrats have come in decades to winning a statewide seat and happened during a midterm election that wound up being a strong year for Democrats nationally.
Texas Democrats have struggled to recapture that momentum since then. O’Rourke lost by double digits when he challenged Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in 2022.
Article continues below this ad
“Things are shifting in the state. It takes a long time,” said Jared Hockeman, the chairman of the Democratic Party in Cameron County along the U.S.-Mexico border. “We recognize that.”
Murphy reported from Oklahoma City.
[ad_2]
By PAUL J. WEBER and SEAN MURPHY, Associated Press
