Politics

US News - A fake Certificate of Votes was submitted to the U.S. Senate following Michigan’s 2020 presidential election, an official testified Tuesday during a preliminary hearing for six people facing forgery and other charges for allegedly serving as false electors.  t that “purported” Certificate of Votes didn't match an official document signed by Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and featuring the Michigan state seal, said Dan Schwager, who served in 2020-2021 as general counsel to the secretary of the Senate. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel has charged 15 Republicans in the case. Investigators have said the group signed a document during a meeting at the Michigan Republican headquarters on Dec. 14, 2020, falsely stating they were the state’s “duly elected and qualified electors..

Daily Kos - The Republican Party took in only $87.2 million in donations during 2023, compared with $176.6 million in 2022, ending the year with a scant $8 million in the bank. That’s barely enough to run one 30-second Super Bowl ad, much less power Donald Trump through his 2024 election. It certainly won’t cover his legal bills. 

Inequality - Amidst all the nail-biting uncertainty over the 2024 election, one thing’s for sure: turnout will be key.  This week, the Poor People’s Campaign announced plans to mobilize a potentially powerful yet often overlooked voting bloc: the 85 million eligible voters who are poor or low-income. The campaign has crunched the numbers and determined that if this bloc voted at the same rate as higher-income voters, they could sway elections in every state. But most voting drives and political candidates still ignore this segment of our society.  “The conventional wisdom – which isn’t very wise – is that the poor don’t care about voting,” said Poor People’s Campaign Policy Director Shailly Gupta Barnes at a February 5 press conference. “But that’s just not true.” 

“Political campaigns do not talk to them or speak to their issues,” explained campaign co-chair Bishop William J. Barber, II. “In our election cycles sometimes we have 15, 20 debates for president. In 2020, not one of those – not 15 minutes – was given to raising questions about how the policies of that particular party or politician would impact poor and low-income people.” The Poor People’s Campaign is planning 42 weeks of action aimed at pushing the concerns of poor and low-income people into the center of the 2024 political debate. The kick-off will be on March 2, with marches to state legislatures in 32-plus states.

Guardian - The Democratic-led US Senate has voted to pass a $95.34bn aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, amid growing doubts about the legislation’s fate in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. In a pre-dawn vote, lawmakers cleared the 60-vote threshold to send the legislation on to the House. Joe Biden has been urging Congress for months to hurry through the new aid to Ukraine and US partners in the Indo-Pacific, including Taiwan. After Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel, the US president also requested funds for the US ally, along with humanitarian aid for Palestinians in Gaza...The bill appears to face long odds of getting to the floor in the House, where the Republican Speaker, Mike Johnson, criticised it for lacking conservative provisions to stem a record flow of migrants across the US-Mexico border.