Solwd

Giorgia Meloni led her right-wing allies in a joint rally Thursday ahead of their expected victory in weekend elections, in which the one-time Mussolini supporter hopes to become Italy’s first female prime minister.  …read more

https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20220923-meloni-rallies-supporters-as-italy-s-right-moves-closer-to-historic-win

On June 19, 1939, over lunch at the White House, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. attempted something he was loathe to do: He prodded his best friend. “A year has passed,” he told Franklin D. Roosevelt, “and we have not got anywhere on this Jewish refugee thing. What are we going to do about it?”

No other member of the Roosevelt cabinet enjoyed a relationship as intimate with the president; the two had a standing date for a private lunch on Mondays. Across Washington, Morgenthau and his wife Elinor were known as the couple closest to the Roosevelts: Since the early 1920s, they had worked together, socialized together and, long before the New Deal, made common cause. (“From one of two of kind,” FDR had once inscribed a photograph to Elinor.) Morgenthau rarely dared to risk his most treasured friendship. But the saga of the St. Louis, the ship carrying nearly a thousand Jewish refugees that had reached Florida only to be turned back to Europe, haunted him. The tragedy, coming just days before his lunch at the White House, laid bare the grim truths of the crisis unfolding on the continent.

The only son of the New York real estate baron — Henry Morgenthau, Sr., who’d become America’s most vocal anti-Zionist — Henry Jr. was reared as a devout assimilationist. He’d never even attended a Passover Seder. But the desperate news from Europe had stirred something, brought a change that those few who were close to him would later call an “awakening.”

The war in Europe would test Morgenthau in ways unlike any other member of the Roosevelt administration. In “those terrible eighteen months,” as he would later call the period after the summer of 1942, when he first learned that “the Nazis were planning to exterminate all the Jews of Europe,” Morgenthau would find himself surrounded by threats: an anti-immigrant old guard at the State Department, “America First” isolationists on Capitol Hill and enraged Zionist leaders desperate for the attention of the White House. He would face the greatest test of his 12-year tenure in Washington, risking all that he held most dear: not only his friendship with FDR, but the trust of his best men at Treasury and even the faith of his own family. In the end, Morgenthau would rely on his moral compass — “Franklin’s conscience,” Eleanor Roosevelt liked to call him — to affirm his belief in America as a sanctuary for the persecuted, and press his best friend to act, before it was too late, to save the remaining Jews of Europe. Now, as the nation finds itself once more bitterly divided over its obligations to the world’s refugees, the story of Morgenthau’s crusade serves as a poignant reminder of what can happen when government officials stand up to the misdeeds of their own administration.

At lunch on that Monday in June 1939, just a few months before Germany would invade Poland and start …read more

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/09/23/henry-morgenthau-roosevelt-government-europes-jews-00058206

On Wednesday, September 21, New York State Attorney General Letitia James filed a 220-page lawsuit in New York State Supreme Court accusing Donald Trump and three of his children of using wildly inaccurate evaluations of Trump Tower, Mar-a-Lago and multiple other properties to defraud lenders and cheat on taxes. The result, she said, was a “staggering” and “astounding” scheme that yielded an estimated $250 million in ill-gotten gains.

James termed these financial manipulations “the art of the steal,” a play on the title of Trump’s 1987 bestselling memoir The Art of the Deal. In that book, Trump (or, more likely, his co-author, journalist Tony Schwartz) called his aggressive salesmanship “truthful hyperbole,” which was explained as “an innocent form of exaggeration — and a very effective form of promotion.” The reason, Trump (or Schwartz) said, was that “people want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular,” and Trump was more than willing to oblige them. His flair for tall tales would be his MO for more than four decades and arguably catapulted him to the presidency. But now, his main tactic has left him open to a civil suit that threatens to unravel his empire.

He’d started back in the mid-70s with his first Manhattan project, the Grand Hyatt Hotel. It was a gut rehab of an older hotel, and the young developer was stuck with the original height. But he managed to make it seem new and exciting by attaching a glass skin to the old brick façade and by inflating the floor numbers so that guests staying on what would previously have been floors six to 26 could boast to friends that they were on higher and more exclusive-sounding floors 14 to 34. Likewise, he declared his hotel’s ballroom the biggest in the city and insisted this was the case even after he was told otherwise. On his next project, Trump Tower, what would be the 59th story elsewhere became the 68th floor, and the 700-foot-high building was billed as the world’s tallest concrete structure despite being third in line behind Chicago’s Water Tower Place (850 feet) and the MLC Center in Sydney, Australia (771 feet).

His father, Fred Trump, had built a real estate empire in Brooklyn and Queens with far more modest signature touches like an extra closet and a garage underneath each row house. Now Donald Trump was taking this idea to the next level, using a grab-bag of gimmicks (renumbered floors, biggest ballroom) to seize attention and bump up profits. People who had balked at paying $20 a night to stay at the Grand Hyatt’s predecessor were thrilled to fork over many times that amount to stay in essentially the same building once it was sheathed in glass and touted as the latest thing. At Trump Tower, residents paid top prices for condos and seemed oblivious that their view was no better than that available in adjacent buildings on floors that were at the same height but …read more

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/09/23/trump-tish-james-fraud-00058475

Donald Trump’s top lieutenants are launching a new super PAC that is expected to spend heavily to bolster his endorsed candidates in the midterm election — and, some people close to the former president say, could become a campaign apparatus if he runs in 2024.

Sanctioned by the former president, the new group, dubbed MAGA, Inc., will become the primary vehicle for Trump’s operation to engage in political activity in 2022. The outfit is designed to funnel large sums into key races and could conceivably be used to boost Trump in the event he seeks the White House again.

The organization provides the clearest indication yet of how Trump plans to engage during the final stretch of the midterm campaign and, those in the former president’s orbit say, offers a preview into what the structure of a 2024 campaign could look like. Republicans have been heavily outspent in races across the map, and party strategists have been anxious for Trump — by far the party’s biggest money magnet — to help financially.

Trump has spent minimally on behalf of Republican candidates so far this year, but that’s about to change with the new super PAC. Save America, the former president’s leadership PAC and one of the best-funded entities in politics, has around a $100 million cash reserve — money that can be transferred to MAGA, Inc.

“President Trump is committed to saving America, and Make America Great Again, Inc. will ensure that is achieved at the ballot box in November and beyond,” said Taylor Budowich, a Trump spokesperson.

MAGA, Inc. will be overseen by Budowich, who’s been serving as the former president’s communications director and was previously a senior adviser on his 2020 reelection campaign. Chris LaCivita, a veteran Republican operative who in 2020 ran the biggest-spending pro-Trump super PAC, will be the vehicle’s chief strategist. Tony Fabrizio, a longtime Trump pollster who worked on his 2016 and 2020 campaigns, will oversee polling.

Running the finance team will be veteran GOP fundraiser Meredith O’Rourke, who has worked for Trump. The communications department will be staffed by Steven Cheung, who worked on Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns and worked in his administration, and Alex Pfeiffer, a conservative media strategist and former producer for Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

Sergio Gor, the publisher of Trump’s post-presidential book “A Journey Together,” will be a senior adviser.

Until now, Trump’s political operation had been staffed by a small number of close advisers. The new super PAC will mark a significant build-out of his political apparatus.

MAGA, Inc. will effectively merge with the existing pro-Trump super PAC, MAGA Again!, which is run by former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi. MAGA, Again! has had a relatively low profile throughout the midterms and has struggled to make an impact in races, though a person familiar with the group said it recently held a fundraiser at Trump’s Bedminster, N.J. golf club that raised $1 million. Like Save America, MAGA, …read more

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/09/23/trump-midterms-2024-pac-00058515

Did Nina Totenberg know a secret that could have changed history?

The question hovers over Dinners With Ruth, Totenberg’s new memoir of her four-decade friendship with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, complicating the chronicle of the pair’s triumphs and sorrows, lingering in the air like the fishy aroma of the bouillabaisse Totenberg used to bring to the ailing justice.

It’s a question whose implications — for women’s rights, the Constitution, the future of the republic — are more important than the by now familiar debate over whether a National Public Radio reporter’s controversial ties to a powerful jurist she covered violated journalism-school best practices.

It was 2020, an election was looming, and RBG was dying. During lockdown, we learn in the book, Totenberg’s home was the one place Ginsberg went other than her own apartment. Their weekly Saturday suppers made Totenberg one of the few Americans to lay eyes on the justice during the months of isolation. By July, Ginsburg could not climb the six steps into the house without a bodyguard holding her around the waist. At her apartment, she fell asleep midmeal, a fork still in her hand. She wore clothes meant to disguise how much weight she’d lost. Her gloves — which had become a fashion statement — were actually there to cover the IV wounds on her hands.

After a hospital stay, she confessed, for the first time, that she had thought she was going to die there.

Anyone who has watched a loved one fade understands how you can just know, even before you admit it to yourself. “I kept thinking, ‘C’mon, Ruth, you can do it, you can do it,’” Totenberg writes, referencing a scare right before Covid struck. “But I was enough of a realist that I would also wake every morning worrying about her.” As 2020 progressed, the reality became clearer still. “In the beginning, I had conned myself into thinking that there was every reason to believe Ruth would survive this. But as the months rolled on, it became clear that this illness wasn’t just lung cancer. It was a return of the old pancreatic cancer,” one of the deadliest forms of the disease.

What if Totenberg had gone on the air to lay out what she knew?

I don’t mean raiding the HIPAA-protected files of her physician husband, whom Ginsburg had by then made part of her medical team. (Totenberg, sticking to the rough ground rules that enabled her to combine her roles as friend and reporter, kept herself out of the loop on specifics). But maybe she could have broadcast just the things that would have been clear to a dispassionate observer, albeit hard for a devoted friend to accept: that Ginsburg was a desperately sick woman, that her family and friends were engaged in what amounted to an unacknowledged death watch — a report that would have lent flesh-and-blood immediacy to the bland statements from the court’s press office.

I, for one, would have been interested to learn …read more

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/09/23/nina-totenberg-dinners-with-ruth-bader-ginsburg-00058467

Mitch McConnell opposed conviction in Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial. He may yet help clean up the mess of Jan. 6.

Things are playing out differently in the Senate GOP after only nine House Republicans — all of them retiring from Congress — supported updating a 19th-century law that Trump’s allies sought to manipulate to keep him in power. Even as House GOP leaders whipped against the post-Jan. 6 legislation this week, McConnell has encouraged his members to seek a deal with Democrats and is himself leaning toward backing the effort, according to senators in both parties.

“I presume that if we get the bill that was negotiated by the bipartisan group, that he’ll support it,” said Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah).

So far, the Kentucky Republican is keeping tight-lipped publicly amid the tension in his party over how to handle a bill directly aimed at Trump’s push to overturn his 2020 election loss, as well as the GOP lawmakers who objected to President Joe Biden’s Electoral College win. In a brief interview this week, McConnell said Congress does “need to fix” the 1887 law known as the Electoral Count Act. “And I’ll have more to say about my feelings about that later.”

He’s likely to reveal his position Tuesday, when the Rules Committee votes on the Senate legislation. McConnell is a member of the panel, alongside Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who supports the effort.

McConnell’s potential OK for the post-Jan. 6 bill offers a window on the fraught political dynamic that informed his response to the Capitol siege and still dictates his approach to the former president. McConnell excoriated Trump for the attack, calling him “practically and morally responsible,” yet voted to acquit him in last year’s Senate impeachment trial.

McConnell also blocked a bipartisan commission to investigate the events of Jan. 6 and has largely aligned with Trump’s preferences in Senate races. But he stays away from criticizing the House’s Jan. 6 select committee, observing last year that “it will be interesting to reveal all the participants who were involved” in the riot. He doesn’t speak to Trump and avoids talking about the former president publicly.

Senators involved in pushing changes to the electoral certification process say McConnell’s kept his distance while advocating to keep the bill as narrow as possible. But he’s also had a senior aide provide analysis to the group and connected them with at least one constitutional scholar to help them draft the bill, according to Maine Sen. Susan Collins, its lead Republican sponsor.

McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s likely divergent stances on the election law is the latest example of the chasm between the two Republican leaders and how they approach Trump. Lest his position on …read more

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/09/23/mcconnell-jan-6-mop-senate-republicans-00058439

A liberal group focused on secretary of state races is making its first major investments of the midterm election cycle, putting down seven-figure buys in a pair of states where the chief election officer is on the ballot in November.

iVote, the organization behind the buys, is launching $2 million TV advertising campaigns in both Minnesota and Michigan. Both states have incumbent Democratic secretaries of state: Steve Simon and Jocelyn Benson, respectively.

POLITICO first reported on the plans for the new buy. The group had previously announced its intentions to spend $15 million on a paid media campaign this cycle — about twice as much as it spent during the 2018 cycle.

“The difference between a functioning Democracy and a constitutional crisis-in-waiting is who wins these seats,” Hari Sevugan, an iVote board member who in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary was deputy campaign manager for Pete Buttigieg, now the Transportation secretary, said in a statement to POLITICO.

The organization’s first ad comes in Michigan and attacks Kristina Karamo, the opponent of Benson who is endorsed by former President Donald Trump. She rose to prominence after serving as a poll challenger during the 2020 election, pushing conspiracy theories about the processing of absentee ballots in the state.

The ad, which is set to start airing on Friday, does not, however, focus on her as the next potential chief election official of the state. Instead, it seeks to cast her as disqualified from serving in public office for calling abortion “child sacrifice” and speaking at a conference organized by prominent proponents of the QAnon conspiracy theory. (She has said she does not support that conspiracy.)

“In politics, there are Democrats, independents, Republicans — and then there’s Kristina Karamo,” the ad’s narrator says. “Regardless of party, Karamo is dangerously unfit for office.”

The Minnesota ad campaign is set to begin next month. There, Simon is facing Republican Kim Crockett, who has also sought to undermine confidence in her state’s elections.

iVote has assembled a who’s who of past Democratic — and even one Republican — presidential campaigns. Its board members include Sevugan, of the Buttigieg campaign and Addisu Demissie, of the 2020 presidential campaign of Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.). Tim Hogan, who worked on the 2020 presidential campaign of Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), is an adviser to the group.

Secretary of state races have been under a microscope since the 2020 election, when Trump tried to pressure election officials at all levels of government to help overturn his loss.

Since then, allies of Trump have targeted the office in several battleground states, running on the false premise that the 2020 election was overrun with fraud. They often campaign promising to both relitigate the past presidential election in their state while …read more

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/09/23/secretary-of-state-ivote-00058499

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis’ refusal to give advance notice before flying migrants to cities is causing chaos among immigrant groups and states trying to anticipate where his next flight will land.

Without a heads up, they are left scrambling — with just hours to help migrants find shelter, food and legal guidance. When DeSantis sent asylum seekers to Martha’s Vineyard with little notice, residents were forced to rely on Spanish-speaking high school students to translate and dozens of migrants spent the night in a church, the best shelter available at the time.

Even the White House this week was rushing to coordinate with Delaware officials after a flight was expected to land in President Joe Biden’s home state. Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott had previously send several busloads of migrants to Vice President Kamala Harris’ residence at the Naval Observatory.

Many of those relief groups are now collaborating and preparing for the next plane of migrants, which DeSantis has promised to send. They’ve built upon pre-existing informal networks of immigration, legal and advocacy organizations throughout the U.S. to rapidly deploy services once they get news of the next flight.

“There has been the creation of this sort of national infrastructure so there can be help waiting, whether they are coming to the south or going to cities across the country,” Luis Mata, the Tennessee Immigrant & Refugee Rights Coalition’s policy director, said during an interview.

On Tuesday, humanitarian and aid organizations — as well as the White House and state officials — hurriedly organize services after a flight from Texas was scheduled to land near Rehoboth, the summer vacation spot on the Delaware coast where President Joe Biden has a home and regularly visits. The flight was eventually re-routed to Nashville, Tennessee and then to a small airport in Teterboro, New Jersey but apparently wasn’t transporting migrants.

“Staff communicated with friends and colleagues in New Jersey to give them information that they could be headed your way and to get ready,” Mata, who is based in Tennessee, said.

The national network of groups offering resources for migrants has long been in place. But they have bulked up recently after DeSantis’ Martha’s Vineyard stunt and as Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott continues to bus thousands of migrants from the southern border to cities like NYC and Washington. Both DeSantis and Abbott are running for reelection this year. Democrats, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom, have pressed the Justice Department to investigate DeSantis over the flights and a sheriff in Texas also said he opened a probe into the Florida governor.

The move by these groups to strengthen coordination and increase services speaks to the confusion and disorder DeSantis and Abbott’s migrant transports are causing. Chicago, NYC and Washington, D.C. are struggling to handle the influx of migrants flowing into their cities.

But DeSantis isn’t backing down. During a press conference in Miami on Thursday, the Florida governor denied he would …read more

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/09/23/desantis-immigration-groups-marthas-vineyard-00058476

MONONGAHELA, Pa. — House Republican leaders arrived here prepared to show they can do two things at once: keep hammering Joe Biden while finally acting on their policy ideas.

Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, alongside Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) and Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), plan to formally unveil an agenda here that focuses on ramping up fossil-fuel production, curbing illegal immigration and combating crime, echoing their most salient campaign-trail points against Democrats. To many Republicans, the platform feels like a turning point for their conference after four years stuck in the House minority.

“This is not just talking points,” said Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), who has served for two decades under three GOP speakers. “It’s actually a real agenda. It’s not a political agenda — it’s an agenda of what we want to do starting on Day One.”

And while they vow to turn their blueprint into House-passed bills next year, not just fodder for the final pre-midterms sprint, many of Republicans’ top issues — from supply chains in China to police hiring to transgender student athletes — were battle-tested to serve as a unifying national message.

In GOP leaders’ briefing to members on Thursday, for instance, they highlighted that crime was a “top issue” for Latino men, and that stressing they want to “reduce reliance” on foreign countries’ oil “scores well across the board.” On the issue of China, Republican leaders highlighted polling that showed 23 percent of independents called it their “top issue.”

For the most part, the GOP’s blueprint does not say precisely which specific bills they plan to use to advance their goals or what level of priority each would receive. But Republicans contend it offers critical direction as they plot the path back to the majority, both on the campaign trail and in developing detailed policy to roll out come January.

And Republicans quickly began utilizing the plan’s topline points on their social media platforms after its soft launch on Thursday.

“I think the American people, once they see that we mean business with this. I think it’s gonna restore trust,” said Rep. Bill Johnson (R-Ohio.).

Along with their glossy bullet-pointed pamphlets, McCarthy and his leadership team also have a disciplined messaging schedule, where lawmakers are urged to hammer a single message from their plan each week, culminating in Election Day on Nov. 8.

The plan received endorsements across the conference and candidate slate, from Freedom Caucus members to battleground Republicans like Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.) to McCarthy critic and Army Special Forces veteran Joe Kent, who’s running in Washington state.

Even Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — who made his disagreement known after his own campaign arm chief released a GOP …read more

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/09/23/house-gop-2023-mccarthy-00058455

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — An epic heat wave this summer brought California’s power grid to the brink of collapse, and put its governor on defense as he touted the state’s nation-leading climate goals.

In Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s telling, the state kept the lights on because of its efforts to bolster renewable energy.

“Went right up to the edge of breaking our grid, but it didn’t,” Newsom said at a Clinton Global Initiative event this week, describing this month’s scorcher to dignitaries gathered in New York City for Climate Week at the U.N. “This transition worked.”

The reality, however, is a lot messier.

California’s recent decisions to postpone the closure of its last nuclear plant and to extend the life of some natural gas-fired facilities highlight what officials and experts say is the fact that the state with the most ambitious energy goals is far from achieving them.

Growing demand for electricity and the fickle nature, for now, of greener technologies such as wind and solar are making it hard to progress toward the state-mandated goal of a grid that’s 100 percent emissions-free by 2045. Renewables provided 36 percent of the state’s power supply on average so far this year.

Those constraints were behind the recent decision by the Legislature, at Newsom’s urging, to postpone the retirement of the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant despite the fact that activists thought they’d secured its closure — and the governor himself once supported the idea.

The 10 days of triple-digit temperatures across the state this month sent power demand surging to a record level, bringing state regulators close to ordering rolling blackouts, a potentially deadly move and a political disaster.

It was the realization of a nightmare scenario a top state energy official said he’s been considering for months.

“Oh, my lord, we are in a very bad situation compared to even the worst case that we anticipated,” Siva Gunda, vice chair of the California Energy Commission, said he recalls thinking in the spring, when supply chain delays and a tariff on solar imports — compounded by severe drought — started to look like a multi-year power crisis.

The possibility of rolling blackouts became a shadow looming over California Democrats, even those who felt uneasy about keeping Diablo Canyon open. Some talked publicly about how outages contributed to the impeachment of then-Gov. Gray Davis at the beginning of the century.

What’s needed now, officials say, is even more investment by the state akin to the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe after World War II.

“Enough isn’t being done right now” to avoid a worrying gap in the power supply in the future, said state Sen. John Laird, a Democrat from Santa Cruz who has argued the state needs …read more

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/09/23/californias-lofty-climate-goals-clash-with-reality-00058466