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  • Trump inadvertently boosts Biden's stimulus messaging with another statement raging against McConnell

    Former President Donald Trump has released a new post-presidency statement, and Democrats might just be glad he did. The former president, who remains permanently banned from Twitter, released a statement Thursday once again raging against Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), blasting him as the "most unpopular politician in the country" while blaming him for Republicans' Senate losses in Georgia — losses for which Trump himself has been blamed by other Republicans. One of the reasons Republicans lost the two Georgia Senate runoffs in January, Trump argues, was "Mitch McConnell's refusal to go above $600 per person on the stimulus check payments when the two Democrat opponents were touting $2,000 per person in ad after ad." The statement offered "quite the pre-stimulus political gift to Democrats," wrote National Journal's Josh Kraushaar, while The Washington Post's Dave Weigel noted that Trump "remarkably" used this opportunity to "validate Biden's messaging on the $1,400 checks instead of whacking him and Democrats for curtailing them." Remarkably, Trump also uses this statement to validate Biden's messaging on the $1400 checks instead of whacking him and Democrats for curtailing them. "The $2000 will be approved anyway by the Democrats." https://t.co/M9dXoX13VS — Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) March 4, 2021 Indeed, Trump writes that "the $2,000 will be approved anyway by the Democrats," while offering no comment on the fact that the new checks are actually for $1,400, nor on Biden's recent compromise that narrows the eligibility. Politico's Gabby Orr observed that Trump "could have put out a statement saying the income phase-outs in the Biden stimulus bill are going to mean he gave checks to more Americans," but "instead he's still targeting his own party with stuff like this." This was just Trump's latest statement in this vein after he released another one last month describing McConnell as an "unsmiling political hack." He also mentioned McConnell in a recent Conservative Political Action Conference speech, in which he took credit for McConnell's recent re-election. McConnell told Fox News he "didn't watch" the speech and that "we're dealing with the present and the future, not looking back to the past." More stories from theweek.com7 scathingly funny cartoons about Trump's CPAC appearanceThe Republican grievance perpetual motion machineTrump wants revenge on Alaska's Sen. Murkowski. His advisers think he won't follow through because the flight is too long.

  • Alien 'super-Earth' may offer clues about atmospheres on distant worlds

    Scientists have spotted a planet orbiting a star relatively near our solar system that may offer a prime opportunity to study the atmosphere of a rocky Earth-like alien world - the type of research that could aid the hunt for extraterrestrial life. The researchers said on Thursday the planet, called Gliese 486 b and classified as a 'super-Earth,' is not itself a promising candidate as a refuge for life. But its proximity to Earth and its physical traits make it well suited for a study of its atmosphere with the next generation of space-borne and ground-based telescopes, starting with the James Webb Space Telescope that NASA has slated for an October launch.

  • NC Republicans censured Richard Burr. But they are silent on Madison Cawthorn.

    Rep. Cawthorn addressed accusations against him this week — when a Newsmax anchor asked him if the media was just attacking him to distract from Gov. Cuomo’s scandal.

  • Getting a 'COVID arm' rash after the Moderna vaccine might be itchy, but it's no big deal

    Some people have reported a red, raised rash that shows up days to a week after getting the Moderna shot and goes away quickly.

  • It is hard to overstate just how unusual Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's media war with Buckingham Palace is

    A series of extraordinary confrontations have seen the Queen's household accused of a smear capaign and Markle accused of bullying.

  • "Bounce back better together": PM Johnson urges Britons to lose weight

    LONDON (Reuters) - "We'll bounce back better together," Prime Minister Boris Johnson told overweight Britons on Thursday, championing his own weight loss and health eating diet to try to persuade others to get in shape to reduce coronavirus risks. After being hospitalised with COVID last year, Johnson has often spoken about how he believes his weight was behind how severely ill he became and how since then he has started a new exercise regime and no late-night cheese diet.

  • Trump served with lawsuit accusing him of breaking ‘Ku Klux Klan’ laws on day of Capitol riot

    NAACP accuses Trump of disenfranchising Black voters and trying to ‘destroy democracy’

  • Ireland says UK not behaving like a 'respectable country'

    Britain's decision to make unilateral changes to Northern Irish Brexit arrangements is "not the appropriate behaviour of a respectable country" and will erode trust with the European Union, senior Irish ministers said on Thursday. The EU promised legal action on Wednesday after the British government unilaterally extended a grace period for checks on food imports to Northern Ireland, a move Brussels said violated terms of Britain's divorce deal.

  • Another Trump on the ballot? Lara Trump eyes Senate seat

    A Trump may be on the ballot next year — but not Donald Trump. The former president's daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, is eyeing the North Carolina Senate seat being vacated by Republican Richard Burr. While many in the state are skeptical she will move forward, an entrance into the race would set up a crucial test of whether Donald Trump's popularity among Republicans, which remains massive more than a month after leaving office, can translate to others.

  • Prosecutors: Officer was on Floyd's neck for about 9 minutes

    As the trial approaches for a white Minneapolis police officer charged with murder in the death of George Floyd, prosecutors are putting the time Derek Chauvin’s knee was on the Black man's neck at about nine minutes. The fact that the figure has evolved probably won't matter at Chauvin’s trial, which begins Monday with jury selection. One former prosecutor says it’s common for such details to be fine-tuned as prosecutors build a case.

  • Trump must tell his supporters to 'stand down' from new threat to storm Capitol, GOP Rep. Michael McCaul says

    Security officials have warned that Trump supporters could target the Capitol again this week.

  • Boris Johnson fails to replace adviser on ministerial standards amid growing cronyism allegations

    Boris Johnson has yet to appoint a successor to his adviser on ministerial standards, more than three months after the resignation of Sir Alex Allan.

  • The Trumps are trying to sell a Florida home for $49 million after buying it from the former president's sister for $18 million in 2018

    Eric Trump tweeted a listing for a home that the family is trying to sell through a limited liability company for more than twice its 2018 value.

  • U.S. bomber flies over Baltic states in show of solidarity: U.S. Air Force

    A long-range U.S. bomber flew over the capitals of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia on Wednesday in a show of solidarity with NATO allies, the U.S. Air Force said, amid Western concerns over a more assertive Russia. "This mission sends a clear message that our commitment to our NATO allies is unshakeable," Gen. Jeff Harrigian, U.S. Air Forces in Europe-Air Forces Africa commander said in a statement. Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were once ruled from Moscow but are now part of both NATO and the European Union.

  • Republicans Won Blue-Collar Votes. They're Not Offering Much in Return.

    As the election returns rolled in showing President Donald Trump winning strong support from blue-collar voters in November while suffering historic losses in suburbs across the country, Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, a Republican, declared on Twitter: “We are a working class party now. That’s the future.” And with further results revealing that Trump had carried 40% of union households and made unexpected inroads with Latinos, other Republican leaders, including Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, trumpeted a political realignment. Republicans, they said, were accelerating their transformation into the party of Sam’s Club rather than the country club. But since then, Republicans have offered very little to advance the economic interests of blue-collar workers. Two major opportunities for party leaders to showcase their priorities have unfolded recently without a nod to working Americans. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times In Washington, as Democrats advance a nearly $2 trillion economic stimulus bill, they are facing universal opposition from congressional Republicans to the package, which is chock-full of measures to benefit struggling workers a full year into the coronavirus pandemic. The bill includes $1,400 checks to middle-income Americans and extended unemployment benefits, which are set to lapse on March 14. And at a high-profile, high-decibel gathering of conservatives in Florida last weekend, potential 2024 presidential candidates, including Hawley and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, scarcely mentioned a blue-collar agenda. They used their turns in the national spotlight to fan grievances about “cancel culture,” to bash the tech industry and to reinforce Trump’s false claims of a stolen election. Inside and outside the party, critics see a familiar pattern: Republican officials, following Trump’s own example, are exploiting the cultural anger and racial resentment of a sizable segment of the white working class, but have not made a concerted effort to help these Americans economically. “This is the identity conundrum that Republicans have,” said Carlos Curbelo, a Republican former congressman from Florida, pointing to the universal opposition by House Republicans to the stimulus bill drawn up by President Biden and congressional Democrats. “This is a package that Donald Trump would have very likely supported as president.” “Here is the question for the Rubios and the Hawleys and the Cruzes and anyone else who wants to capitalize on this potential new Republican coalition,” Curbelo added. “Eventually, if you don’t take action to improve people’s quality of life, they will abandon you.” Some Republicans have sought to address the strategic problem. Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah put forward one of the most ambitious GOP initiatives aimed at struggling Americans, a measure to fight child poverty by sending parents up to $350 a month per child. But fellow Republicans rebuffed the plan as “welfare.” Hawley has matched a Democratic proposal for a $15 minimum wage, but with the caveat that it applies only to businesses with annual revenues above $1 billion. Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster whose clients have included Rubio, was critical of Democrats for not seeking a compromise on the stimulus after a group of GOP senators offered a smaller package. “Seven Republican senators voted to convict a president of their own party,” he said, referring to Trump’s impeachment. “If you can’t get any of them on a COVID program, you’re not trying real hard.” As the COVID-19 relief package, which every House Republican voted down, makes its way through the Senate this week, Republicans are expected to offer further proposals aimed at struggling Americans. Ayres said that the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida, last weekend, the first major party gathering since Trump left office, had been a spectacularly missed opportunity in its failure to include meaningful discussion of policies for blue-collar voters. Instead, the former president advanced an intraparty civil war by naming in his speech on Sunday a hit list of every Republican who voted to impeach him. “You’d better be spending a lot more time developing an economic agenda that benefits working people than re-litigating a lost presidential election,” Ayres said. “The question is, how long will it take the Republicans to figure out that driving out heretics rather than winning new converts is a losing strategy right now?” Separately, one of the highest-profile efforts to lift blue-collar workers in the country was underway this week in Alabama, where nearly 6,000 workers at an Amazon warehouse are voting on whether to unionize. On Sunday, the pro-union workers got a boost in a video from Biden. Representatives for Hawley — who has been one of the leading Republican champions of a working-class realignment — did not respond to a request for comment about where he stands on the issue. The 2020 election continued a long-term trend in which the parties have essentially swapped voters, with Republicans gaining with blue-collar workers, while white-collar suburbanites moved toward the Democrats. The idea of “Sam’s Club conservatives,” which was floated about 15 years ago by former Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, recognized a constituency of populist Republicans who favored a higher minimum wage and government help for struggling families. Trump turned out historic levels of support for a Republican among white working-class voters. But once in office, his biggest legislative achievement was a tax cut in which most benefits went to corporations and the wealthy. Oceans of ink have been spilled over whether the white working class’ devotion to Trump had more to do with economic anxiety or with anger toward “elites” and racial minorities, especially immigrants. For many analysts, the answer is that it had to do with both. His advancement of policies to benefit working-class Americans was frequently chaotic and left unresolved. Manufacturing jobs, which had continued their slow recovery since the 2009 financial crisis, flatlined under Trump in the year before the pandemic hit. The former president’s bellicose trade war with China hit American farmers so hard economically that they received large bailouts from taxpayers. “There was never a program to deal with the types of displacements going on,” said John Russo, a former co-director of the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University in Ohio. He projects that once the economy snaps back to pre-pandemic levels, blue-collar Americans will be worse off, because employers will have accelerated automation and will continue workforce reductions adopted during the pandemic. “Neither party is talking about that,” Russo said. “I think that by 2024, that’s going to be a key issue.” It’s possible that Republicans who are not prioritizing economic issues are accurately reading their base. A survey last month by the GOP pollster Echelon Insights found that the top concerns of Republican voters were mainly cultural ones: illegal immigration, lack of support for the police, high taxes and “liberal bias in mainstream media.” Despite Biden’s campaign framing him as “middle-class Joe” from Scranton, Pennsylvania, as a candidate he made only slight inroads into Trump’s support with white voters without college degrees, which disappointed Democratic strategists and party activists. In exit polls, these voters preferred Trump over Biden by 35 percentage points. Among voters of color without a college degree, Trump won one out of four votes, an improvement from 2016, when he won one in five of their votes. His inroads with Latinos in South Florida and the Rio Grande Valley of Texas especially shocked many Democrats, and it spurred Rubio to tweet that the future of the GOP was “a party built on a multi-ethnic multi-racial coalition of working AMERICANS.” After the Trump presidency, it is an open question whether any other Republican candidates can win the same intensity of blue-collar support. “Whatever your criticisms are of Trump — and I have a lot — clearly he was able to connect to those people and they voted for him,” said Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio, a Democrat from the Youngstown area. Ryan is gearing up to run in 2022 for an open Senate seat in Ohio. He agrees with Trump about taking on China, but faults him for not following up his tough language with sustained policies. “I think there’s an opportunity to have a similar message but a real agenda,” he said. As for Republican presidential candidates aspiring to inherit Trump’s working-class followers, Ryan saw only dim prospects for them, especially if they continued to reject the Biden stimulus package, which passed the House and is now before the Senate. “The COVID-19 relief bill was directly aimed at the struggles of working-class people,” Ryan said, adding that Republicans voting against the package were “in for a rude awakening.” Perhaps. A Monmouth University poll on Wednesday found that 6 in 10 Americans supported the $1.9 trillion package in its current form, especially the $1,400 checks to people at certain income levels. But Republicans who vote it down may not pay a political price, said Patrick Murray, the poll’s director. “They know that the checks will reach their base regardless, and they can continue to rail against Democratic excesses,” he said. “There would only be a problem if they somehow managed to sink the bill,” he added. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times Company

  • Iran to meet with UN technical experts over uranium find

    Iran has agreed to sit down with international technical experts investigating the discovery of uranium particles at three former undeclared sites in the country, the head of the U.N. atomic watchdog said Thursday, after months of frustration at Tehran's lack of a credible explanation. The agreement came as three of the remaining signatories to the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran — France, Germany and Britain — backed off the idea of a resolution criticizing Iran for its decision to start limiting access by International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors to current facilities. IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi told reporters in Vienna it was not up to him to say whether Iran's move to hold talks with his technical experts was linked to the decision of the so-called E3 group, but suggested it was difficult to separate the political side of Iran's nuclear program from the technical side.

  • McDonald's workers in Denmark are paid $22 per hour so $15 is a 'compromise', AOC says

    McDonald's is one of many major retailers that has stopped publicly fighting against a federal $15 minimum.

  • Biden cuts 16 million people off from stimulus checks after striking deal with moderate Senate Democrats, study says

    Biden approved phasing out direct payments entirely for individuals making above $80,000 a year and married couples earning more than $160,000.

  • Saudi prince pushes on with $500 billion megacity as U.S. points the finger over Khashoggi killing

    Yet preparations for NEOM, the $500 billion signature project in Prince Mohammed bin Salman's drive to diversify Saudi Arabia's economy, are well underway. The organisation behind the development, expected to be close to the size of Belgium when it is completed, will hire 700 people this year, according to Simon Ainslie, the venture's chief operating officer. While NEOM is being sold as a vision of a brighter future, international investors have yet to bite.

  • Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett delivers 1st opinion

    Justice Amy Coney Barrett delivered her first Supreme Court majority opinion Thursday, ruling against an environmental group that had sought access to government records. President Donald Trump's third nominee wrote for a 7-2 court that certain draft documents do not have to be disclosed under the federal Freedom of Information Act. The case was the first one Barrett heard after joining the court in late October, and it took four months for the 11-page opinion to be released.