California State Senator Dianne Feinstein delivers remarks at the 2021 Capitol Christmas Tree lighting ceremony in Washington DC, December 1, 2021. USDA Forest Service photo by Tanya E. Flores.
California Sen. Dianne Feinstein has passed away at age 90.
Sen. Feinstein was the longest-serving woman in the Senate.
Her biography says her “most notable achievements” are the “enactment of the federal Assault Weapons Ban in 1994” and the “six-year review of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program that culminated in the 2014 release of the report’s executive summary and passage of legislation ensuring that certain post-9/11 interrogation methods are never used again.”
“Senator Feinstein’s career has been one of firsts,” her website biography also says. “She was the first woman president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the first woman mayor of San Francisco, the first woman elected Senator of California, the first woman member and first woman ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the first woman to chair the Senate Rules and Administration Committee and the first woman to chair the Senate Intelligence Committee.”
Ann and I are heartbroken by the loss of Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
Dianne’s more than 30 years in the Senate reflect a life of service to her state of California and our nation. We are praying for her family, staff and all who knew and loved her.
Senator Dianne Feinstein was a trailblazer for women in politics. Despite our differences, I enjoyed our work together to protect songwriters and take on Big Tech. My prayers are with her family.
Over the past few months, we have brought you numerous reports of influential Republicans in the Commonwealth and across the country calling on Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin to enter the 2024 Presidential race.
This time, it seems to be much more serious.
Today, an op-ed published in the Washington Post has set the internet rumor mill alight once more.
SCOOP/NEWS: Push for Youngkin 2024 now taking shape as donors and Rs grow alarmed. “Red Vest Retreat” Oct. 17-18 in VA Beach… Billionaire backer Peterffy assures me “money would be there.” Bill Barr telling him to put his “oar in.”https://t.co/vqnO7WLPtX
Matt Gertz of the liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America noted that Fox News gave Youngkin unprecedented airtime this afternoon and ran him through the paces on all of the questions they asked the seven Republican Presidential who took the stage at the Reagan Library last night in Simi Valley, California.
Thirty minutes after the Washington Post published a piece headlined "Alarmed Republicans are preparing to draft Glenn Youngkin," Fox News had him on and basically asked him to answer the questions the GOP candidates were asked at last night's debate. pic.twitter.com/TqyScRmyGk
This interview is now approaching 20 minutes and has been characterized by the anchors lavishing praise on Youngkin and him doin several-minute-long monologues of talking points. https://t.co/lZcBgxQ4Ry
Donald Trump is not impressed by the current pool of Republican candidates…
Following the second Republican presidential debate Trump, the current frontrunner, responded to speculation he could choose his next running mate from the group of current candidates. His answer? No way.
“We’re competing with the job candidates, they’re all running for a job. No, they’re all job candidates,” Trump said of his competition. “They want to be in the – they want to, they’ll do anything, secretary of something, they even say VP.”
“Does anybody see the VP in the group? I don’t think so,” the former president added.
Seven GOP candidates were on the stage Wednesday night at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California.
The seven candidates were North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, former Vice President Mike Pence, biotech entrepreneur and political commentator Vivek Ramaswamy, and Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina.
Who should Trump pick to be his next running mate? Tell us your favorite candidate below.
Kari Lake speaking with supporters at a "Stand for Freedom" rally at the Embassy Suites by Hilton Scottsdale Resort in Scottsdale, Arizona. [Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons]
Popular Arizona MAGA firebrand Kari Lake is reportedly planning to launch her highly anticipated Senate campaign on October 10th, according to her campaign.
Lake’s entrance into the race makes her the most high-profile Republican to seek to unseat Independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema.
Sen. Sinema has yet to announce her re-election campaign, however, Rep. Rueben Gallego (D) is also widely expected to launch a Senate campaign
Blake Masters, who ran an unsuccessful campaign against Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) in 2022, is also reportedly considering another bid for Senate.
However, Trump reportedly dissuaded Masters from running in a phone call, saying that he’d likely lose to Lake in a primary.
She touted strong early polling numbers in lobbying for her candidacy.
“I’ve looked at the polling, to be honest, and I believe I’m the only one who can win that race,” Lake said in July.
Lake, a former television news anchor who rose to prominence after losing the 2022 gubernatorial race to now-Gov. Katie Hobbs (D), has not yet conceded. She still contests that she won the election and that it was fraudulently awarded to Hobbs.
Lake has also been floated as a potential running mate for Trump.
ANALYSIS – Even as the indictments pile up, or maybe because of them, a new national NBC News poll finds former President Donald Trump expanding his national lead in the Republican presidential nominating contest to 43 points over his nearest rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
Trump leads the first-choice field with 59% of national Republican primary voters. In comparison, Ron DeSantis gets support from 16% — followed by former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley at 7% and former Vice President Mike Pence at 4%.
The poll also includes an all-time high disapproval of Joe Biden’s job performance. Fewer than 4 in 10 voters (37%) approve of his handling of the economy. This is huge.
Deeper inside those numbers, Biden is underwater among voters between the ages of 18 and 34 (46% of them approve of his job performance), all women (46%), Latinos (43%) and independents (36%).
What’s more, the NBC News poll finds 37% of voters approve of Biden’s handling of the economy, and 41% approve of his handling of foreign policy.
Biden is also taking a big hit for his open borders policy and unprecedented waves of illegal immigration on his watch, as also shown by a recent The Washington Post-ABC News poll.
“A variety of factors may be at play,” [ABC News’ Gary] Langer writes in his analysis. “Biden’s poor performance ratings, the extent of economic discontent, the immigration crisis and doubts about his age clearly are relevant.”
Axios added: “In the Post-ABC poll, 44% said they’re worse off — the most for any president in the poll since… 1986, ABC News’ Gary Langer said in his poll analysis.”
“In NBC, Biden’s disapproval rating is the highest of his term for that poll.”
NBC News also noted that: “Another 60% have major concerns (45%) or moderate concerns (15%) about Biden’s possible awareness or involvement in the business dealings of his son, Hunter, including alleged financial wrongdoing and corruption.”
“This [NBC] survey is a startling flashing red light for an incumbent party,” said Republican pollster Bill McInturff of Public Opinion Strategies. McInturff conducted the September 15-19 poll with Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt and his team at Hart Research Associates.
“Yes, the numbers for Biden aren’t where he needs them to be,” said Horwitt. However, Trump and Republicans have challenges, such as the GOP front-runner’s unpopularity with the general electorate.
Most polls show that both Trump and Biden have high unfavorability going into a general election.
NBC News reported: “Three-quarters of voters say they’re concerned about President Joe Biden’s age and mental fitness, while nearly two-thirds have concerns about the multiple trials former President Donald Trump faces, a new national NBC News poll finds, casting a gloomy shadow over the upcoming 2024 presidential election.”
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
A New York judge sided with prosecutor Letitia James (D) on Tuesday, ruling that former President Donald Trump is liable for “persistent fraud.”
Last year, New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron found that the defendants, including Trump, his two sons Donald Jr. and Eric, and members of the Trump organization “had a propensity to engage in persistent fraud by submitting false and misleading statements of financial condition on behalf of defendant Donald J. Trump.”
“Defendants followed the same procedure each year to create false and misleading SFCs,” a memo from NY Attorney General Letitia James in support of the plaintiffs’ motion stated in late August. “The SFCs include amounts for Mr. Trump’s assets, mostly real estate holdings, that are represented to be stated ‘at their estimated current values,’ a term defined in the applicable accounting rules as the value that a willing buyer and willing seller could agree on, where both are fully informed and neither is acting under duress. The associated liabilities are then subtracted from the ‘estimated current values’ to derive Mr. Trump’s net worth.”
Engoron wrote in his ruling issued on Tuesday, “Defendants repeat the erroneous argument that the complaint must be dismissed because OAG cannot demonstrate the requirements of a parens patriae action, which is one in the public interest,” then explained that a parens patriae action “permits the state to commence an action to protect a public interest, like the safety, health or welfare of its citizens.”
Trump responded in a post on his social media platform Truth Social.
“The widespread attack against me, my family, and my supporters has devolved to new, un-American depths, at the hands of a DERANGED New York State Judge, doing the bidding of a completely biased and corrupt ‘Prosecutor,’ Letitia James,” Trump wrote. “This is Democrat Political Lawfare, and a Witch Hunt at a level never seen before. It is an attempt to badly injure the opposing Party’s Leading, by far, Political Candidate.”
He added, “Nothing like this has ever happened in our Country before. My Civil Rights have been violated, and some Appellate Court, whether Federal or State, must reverse this horrible, un-American decision. If they can do this to me, they can do this to YOU!”
Former Trump attorney and “fixer” Michael Cohen said the ruling effectively put Trump out of business in the Empire State.
“The damages, in my estimation, with interest and penalty, will exceed $600 million,” Cohen said in a CNN interview Tuesday. “Will that put him into bankruptcy? He does not have the liquid cash in order to pay that off.”
Cohen said that damages trial is likely to be the end of Trump’s businesses, as losing business licenses means that the operations have to shut down.
“As a result of the receivership, those companies will end up being liquidated, especially now that this case is no longer solely about … liability. The judge has already determined that the fraud existed,” Cohen said.
Former President Donald Trump issued a fiery response to the Justice Department’s request for a gag order
On Monday, Trump’s legal team filed a 25-page response to the DOJ’s request.
“The prosecution would silence President Trump, amid a political campaign where his right to criticize the government is at its zenith, all to avoid a public rebuke of this prosecution. However, ‘above all else, the First Amendment means that government has no power to restrict expression because of its message, its ideas, its subject matter, or its content,’” the brief states.
The document adds, “The prosecution may not like President Trump’s entirely valid criticisms, but neither it nor this Court are the filter for what the public may hear.”
The brief disputes claims by prosecutors that Trump’s history of fiery comments about political opponents threatens legal proceedings. Special counsel Jack Smith’s team is aiming to restrict the former president’s ability to comment on the case, claiming his famously fiery and antagonistic rhetoric could affect jurors’ perceptions.
“The defendant knows that when he publicly attacks individuals and institutions, he inspires others to perpetrate threats and harassment against his targets,” prosecutors previously claimed.
On Tuesday, President Biden’s son Hunter filed a lawsuit against former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani alleging the former Trump lawyer violated his privacy rights by illegally disseminating content from Biden’s infamous laptop.
The complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California states Giuliani is “primarily responsible” for the “total annihilation” of Biden’s digital privacy. It also names Robert Costello, a former federal prosecutor who previously represented Giuliani, as a defendant, Fox News has confirmed.
“For the past many months and even years, Defendants have dedicated an extraordinary amount of time and energy toward looking for, hacking into, tampering with, manipulating, copying, disseminating, and generally obsessing over data that they were given that was taken or stolen from Plaintiff’s devices or storage platforms, including what Defendants claim to have obtained from Plaintiff’s alleged ‘laptop’ computer,” Biden’s attorneys wrote in the complaint, claiming that the data was not even from a “laptop,” but from an “external drive.”
ANALYSIS – In case some readers weren’t sure, this is a big reason the conservative GOP ‘Freedom Caucus’ is threatening a government shutdown. Thanks to Joe Biden’s massive spending orgy, the gross U.S. national debt has breached the $33 trillion mark for the first time.
To be precise, according to the U.S. Treasury Department, as of September 18, 2023 (just 12 days short of the end of our fiscal year), the national debt has risen to $33,053,950,837,720 or $33.05 trillion.
America’s runaway inflation, which is crushing everyone’s pocketbooks, is just one result of this part of ‘Bidenomics.’
This unprecedented debt is also fueling concerns that another fight over federal spending may trigger the first government shutdown since 2019.
Without drastic spending cuts, it’s only going to get worse, much worse.
Even accounting for newly passed spending cuts, the U.S. national debt is on track to top $50 trillion by the end of the decade, impacted by mounting interest and the cost of the nation’s social programs.
This is unsustainable; a looming catastrophe waiting to happen.
And, yes, while Donald Trump clearly overspent, especially due to the COVID-19 epidemic, this current staggering debt, and the debt going forward, is mostly Biden’s fault.
As David Winston explained in Rollcall back in April:
The president [Biden] and his White House have taken the 2020 COVID-19, one-time-only crisis budget as his administration’s working baseline, rather than the pre-Covid 2019 budget, which had a significant $4.4 trillion price tag.
In 2020, because of the pandemic, the budget jumped 47 percent to $6.5 trillion, as both Democrats and Republicans supported the need for emergency funding. That COVID funding was to sunset as the country returned to normal — as it did last year. Apparently, Biden decided to ignore that crucial point.
Instead, he saw that supersized budget in 2020 not as a crisis, but an opportunity that could be exploited going forward to pay for what amounted to a historic spending spree that kicked off with the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan and drove what became the worst inflation in 40 years. During Biden’s first two years in office, he oversaw spending that was 40 percent higher than the pre-COVID 2019 budget.
According to the CBO, Biden is going to match Trump’s addition to the national debt in just three years, reaching a total of $7.1 trillion over his four years. That would be $1.5 trillion more than Trump contributed during his term, which included the 2020 one-time COVID emergency spending. If Biden’s 2024 proposed budget actually passed, he would add as much to the national debt as Trump and Bush 43 combined. House Republican leaders have made clear his budget isn’t going anywhere; but it illustrates just how out of control Biden’s spending policies really are.
This is a big reason why the House Freedom Caucus is willing to shut down the government to try to impose some sort of fiscal discipline.
While much of the news has focused on the ‘intransigent’ MAGA conservatives undermining Speaker Kevin McCarthy and the rest of the House Republicans on this issue, Biden refuses to even discuss the House majority’s proposals.
Biden says he wants a “clean” debt ceiling vote without any provisions to control spending. This is not surprising since he just proposed a budget that will reach a record $10 trillion in spending by 2033.
As horrible as a government shutdown will be, allowing this massive debt to keep growing is unacceptable. Without massive cuts, everyday Americans will still be paying the bill, long after Biden is gone.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
Former President Trump pledged over the weekend to launch a full-scale investigation into Comcast, the parent company of NBC and MSNBC, if elected.
In a series of Truth Social posts the former President attacked the networks’ knowingly dishonest and corrupt coverage of people, things, and events.”
“They are almost all dishonest and corrupt, but Comcast, with its one-side and vicious coverage by NBC NEWS, and in particular MSNBC, often and correctly referred to as MSDNC (Democrat National Committee!), should be investigated for its ‘Country Threatening Treason,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post Sunday.
“I say up front, openly, and proudly, that when I WIN the Presidency of the United States, they and others of the LameStream Media will be thoroughly scrutinized for their knowingly dishonest and corrupt coverage of people, things, and events,” the former President wrote.
“The Fake News Media should pay a big price for what they have done to our once great Country!” Trump added.
