Last Call For Lake Of Fire, Con't

With her state "election fraud" case dismissed by Arizona's supreme court, perennial loser Kari Lake is now trying to manufacture new "evidence" that the governor's race was "stolen" from her with a wholesale lie for a new round of legal appeals.

 

A May 28 Instagram post (direct link, archive link) shows a screenshot of a Truth Social post from former Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake. The post includes a clip of people touching and moving voting machines.

"WE CAUGHT THEM," reads Lake's post. "This is VIDEO EVIDENCE from Maricopa County’s own live stream – they didn’t know we were recording – that shows officials breaking into machines AFTER they were tested & sealed. They re-programmed the memory cards right before Election Day, causing 60% of polling locations in GOP areas to stop working. This is SABOTAGE!"

The Instagram post generated over 700 likes in less than a week, and the Truth Social post received over 12,000 likes. Similar posts have garnered hundreds of interactions on Instagram. A Gateway pundit article with a similar claim received over 2,000 shares on Facebook, according to social media insights tool CrowdTangle. 

 

It is of course a massive lie.

 

The video shows election workers inserting new memory cards into tabulation machines as part of standard procedures, according to a Maricopa County election spokesperson. The workers reset the machines to ensure that the memory cards have no votes stored in them. The process is not evidence of sabotage. While printers at some polling places were affected by a glitch on Election Day, the glitches were not related to this process.

Lake, a Republican, ran for governor of Arizona in 2022 and was defeated by Democrat Katie Hobbs by about 17,000 votes. She has since made numerous baseless allegations of election fraud.

Lake’s claim about sabotage is “demonstrably false,” according to Matthew Roberts, the communications manager for the Maricopa County Elections Department. The county also debunked the claim on Twitter.

 

She's lying because she needs to continue to do so in order to fleece her followers for fundraising purposes. She doesn't actually think she's won, she can't actually prove it, and everyone knows it, but the gullible fools are going to give her money anyway.

 

The grift is the only thing that matters.

Shutdown Countdown, Armageddon Edition, Con't

House Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries got the job done yesterday as the debt ceiling deal overwhelmingly passed with bipartisan support, and now GOP House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has to try to save his job.

 

With overwhelming bipartisan support, the House voted Wednesday to pass the debt ceiling legislation negotiated by Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Joe Biden, sending it to the Senate with days to spare before a potentially disastrous default.

The vote was 314 to 117, with 149 Republicans joining 165 Democrats.

The bill would extend the debt limit for two years alongside a two-year budget agreement if it is signed into law. It is the culmination of months of political warfare and weeks of frenzied negotiations between the two parties that finally broke a lengthy stalemate.

The deal overcame heavy criticism from GOP hard-liners, who argued that its spending cuts and conservative provisions are too weak. It also faced opposition from Democrats, who criticized the added work requirements and nondefense spending cuts negotiated by the two men.

“You are getting so many wins for the American people in this bill,” said McCarthy, R-Calif., who hailed it as a measure that “moves us in the right direction” fiscally. He said his message to fellow Republicans on Wednesday was: “You’re not spending more money. There’s no new government programs. There’s no tax increases. There’s nothing in the bill that you really should be negative about.”

Biden praised its passage.

"This budget agreement is a bipartisan compromise," Biden said in a statement. "Neither side got everything it wanted. That’s the responsibility of governing."

The bill now goes to the Democratic-led Senate, where it needs 60 votes before it can get to Biden’s desk. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., have both endorsed it and called for speedy passage.

 

Ironically it was my own normally useless congressman, Thomas Massie, who was the biggest indicator that the bill was going to have the GOP votes needed.  Massie signed off on the bill in the House Rules Committee along with Patrick McHenry, my congressman from back home in NC. Both of these performative contrarians fell right into line when pressed.

Jeffries meanwhile brought the Democrats.

Spokespeople for House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) disputed four Democratic sources who told Axios the two leaders had cut a deal for Democrats to help advance the debt ceiling bill to a final vote.

Why it matters: The 52 Democratic votes on a measure to bring the debt ceiling bill to the floor were necessary for the bill's survival after 29 Republicans had voted against moving it forward Wednesday afternoon. The bill eventually was approved on a 314-117 vote.

What we’re hearing: Four Democratic lawmakers said they had been told of a deal, with two saying they believed it involved boosting federal funding for projects in Democrats’ districts — known as earmarks or “community project funding” — if Democrats voted to advance the bill.

What they're saying: McCarthy had told reporters after the initial afternoon vote that he had not cut a deal to ensure the Democratic votes. A spokesperson later told Axios that there was "absolutely no deal" — and that suggestions to the contrary by Democratic lawmakers were "not accurate."

Jeffries' office also denied there was a deal.

"There was no side deal. House Democrats simply did the right thing and made sure the procedural vote passed because failure was not an option," spokesperson Christie Stephenson told Axios.

Earlier, when reporters had asked Jeffries whether there had been a deal, the minority leader said: "House Democrats to the rescue to avoid a dangerous default and help House Republicans get legislation over the finish line that they negotiated themselves."

The context: The GOP resistance in the procedural "rules" vote was an unusual breach of norms — typically the majority party alone is considered responsible for putting a bill on the floor on those votes.

If Democrats hadn't stepped in, the push for a final vote to move toward avoiding a catastrophic default by the U.S. government would have ground to a halt.

 

"What deal?" says the man who learned everything from Nancy Pelosi a sly grin resting on his face,  now having left Kevin McCarthy to face his caucus alone.

 

As the kids say, GIGACHAD move.

The Road To Gilead Still Goes Through Oklahoma

Oklahoma's state Supreme Court has ruled the state's two most recent civil "bounty" law abortion bans unconstitutional, but has left in place a law from 1910 that makes providing for a "miscarriage" a state felony.

 

The Oklahoma Supreme Court on Wednesday struck down two state laws that ban most abortions because they require a “medical emergency” before a doctor could terminate a pregnancy to save a mother’s life.

In a 6-3 decision, the court said the laws violate the Oklahoma Constitution based on its ruling in March that the constitution provides an inherent right for a woman to terminate a pregnancy to save her own life and does not require the danger to be imminent.

The court has now struck down three strict abortion laws that went into effect after the U.S. Supreme Court reversed itself on abortion rights, striking down Roe v. Wade, from 1973, and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, from 1992. The U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization gave states the authority to make abortion laws, and Oklahoma approved some of the strictest in the nation.

The statute left standing after Wednesday was the law approved in 1910, which states: “Every person who administers to any woman, or who prescribes for any woman, or advises or procures any woman to take any medicine, drug or substance, or uses or employs any instrument, or other means whatever, with intent thereby to procure the miscarriage of such woman, unless the same is necessary to preserve her life, shall be guilty of a felony punishable by imprisonment in the State Penitentiary for not less than two (2) years nor more than five (5) years.”

Both of the laws struck down Wednesday were passed by the Oklahoma Legislature in 2022 and signed by Gov. Kevin Stitt. Stemming from Senate Bill 1603 and House Bill 4327, both laws used civil lawsuits, rather than criminal prosecution, for enforcement. The laws were modeled after ones first approved in Texas, empowering residents to file lawsuits against anyone who might have helped a woman obtain an abortion.

The challenge to the laws was filed by Oklahoma Call for Reproductive Justice, the Tulsa Women’s Reproductive Clinic and other abortion rights groups. The suit named individual county court clerks who would be responsible for filing civil lawsuits to enforce the abortion laws.

The Oklahoma Supreme Court said Wednesday that the House bill used language on medical emergencies identical to that in the law struck down in March, while the Senate bill "provides even more extreme language" than that in the bill that was the subject of the March ruling.

The office of Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond said Wednesday, "“Despite the court’s decisions today on SB 1503 and HB 4327, Oklahoma’s 1910 law prohibiting abortion remains in place. Except for certain circumstances outlined in that statute, abortion is still unlawful in the State of Oklahoma.”

 

So nothing's really changed in the Sooner State. Providing abortion as medical care in Oklahoma still gets you prison time unless you can prove the woman's life was at stake. Reproductive justice still doesn't exist, and thousands of women will still have to go to free states like Colorado or Illinois to get care.

White it's good to stop this civil bounty nonsense on wombs, note the law says miscarriage, not abortion, so potentially failing to carry a pregnancy to term could be investigated as a criminal felony. 

 

This will continue to be the battle of a generation, again.