The House Office of Congressional Ethics found “substantial reason to believe” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) “may have accepted impermissible gifts associated with her attendance at the Met Gala in 2021,” according to documents released on Thursday.

“Rep. Ocasio-Cortez received a series of goods and services which she did not pay for until the OCE opened this review,” according to the review, which cited her dress, makeup, hair styling and transportation.

Ocasio-Cortez’s office acknowledged the tardy payments, but didn’t think they constituted a violate of House rules.

“The congresswoman finds these delays unacceptable, and she has taken several steps to ensure nothing of this nature will happen again,” said Communications Director Lauren Hitt in a statement.

ike most conservatives, I initially welcomed Fox News to the airwaves. A media world that included Jennifer Griffin at the Pentagon, Neal Cavuto on Wall Street, and Charles Krauthammer every evening on Special Report was an overdue counterbalance. An enormous audience had been underserved, and Fox was able to exploit an opening.

But then things went sideways. While we can’t say the Fox News effect was entirely responsible—talk radio too played a role, as did social media—it started to become evident during the Obama years that the right’s impatience with press bias had curdled into something more ominous. Instead of seeking to fact check and balance coverage, Republican and conservative audiences demanded combat. Newt Gingrich turbocharged his anemic presidential campaign in 2011 by using the primary debates not as an opportunity to draw contrasts with his opponents but as a forum for attacking the press. When Politico’s John Harris asked Gingrich about a philosophical dispute regarding health insurance, Gingrich wheeled on him:

I hope all of my friends up here are going to repudiate every effort of the news media to get Republicans to fight each other to protect Barack Obama, who deserves to be defeated, and all of us are committed as a team—whoever the nominee is—we are for defeating Barack Obama.

The crowd vibrated with pleasure, and the belligerent seed that would later bloom into Donald Trump’s war on truth itself was planted.

The revelations in the Dominion Voting Systems legal filings demonstrate the full corruption of Fox News. The channel that debuted with the tagline “fair and balanced” has become completely untethered to any standard of integrity. Its own bias bears no comparison to that of the “mainstream media.” CNN, ABC, and USA Today have their flaws, but at least remain within the bounds of reality. Fox is not a news channel—it is the right’s Pravda. Among the frank acknowledgments of what the channel had become were rebukes to reporters who attempted to tell the simple truth. When reporter Kristin Fisher noted on the air that Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell’s howler of a press conference on November 19 contained allegations that did not align with what Trump’s lawyers were pleading in court and were not supported by evidence, she was rebuked by higher-ups at the network and told to do a better job of “respecting the audience.”

https://19thnews.org/2023/03/anderson-clayton-north-carolina-democratic-party-chair/

North Carolina hasn’t picked a Democrat for the presidency or the U.S. Senate since 2008, when 25-year-old rural organizer and newly elected North Carolina Democratic Party chair Anderson Clayton was in middle school.

Democrats have debated and dissected the reasons for that drought in a state that they hoped, and Republicans feared, was on the cusp of going blue after voting for former President Barack Obama in 2008. Democratic Senate candidate Cheri Beasley’s narrow loss in 2022 spurred another round of soul-searching and finger-pointing. Clayton’s pitch to her party was that sustained, year-round organizing can turn out young people — and bring back the rural voters who have left the party in droves. Ahead of yet another critical election year with abortion access on the line, Democrats ousted their incumbent chair and picked Clayton to lead.

“I can’t wait anymore for people to see rural North Carolina as a place worth investing in,” Clayton, who came to the role as chair of the local Democratic Party in her native Person County, said in an interview.

“I can’t wait for somebody to decide that my life is worth it, that my rights are worth protecting. It needs to be something that I take on right now,” she added. “And I know that there are other young people out there that feel the urgency.”

Cindy McCain is set to take over as head of the United Nations’ World Food Program, putting the longtime political spouse at the top of the globe’s largest humanitarian group and on the frontlines of a growing global food crisis.

The United Nations will announce McCain’s appointment Thursday, according to two people familiar with the matter. The move caps a sharp rise in the global food policy realm for McCain, a close political ally of President Joe Biden and the wife of the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz).


The WFP position is apolitical and the U.N. takes great pains to keep it that way. But McCain’s experience campaigning for her husband and relationships with U.S. politicians will be critical as she seeks to marshal resources for a record-high 349 million people suffering acute food insecurity globally, amid a geopolitical firestorm over the war in Ukraine, concerns about China hoarding global food supplies and, most importantly, calls for a pullback in funding support from members of her own party in the U.S. Congress.

...snip...

While McCain has participated in decades of humanitarian work, her appointment last year as U.S. ambassador to three U.N. food and agriculture agencies marked her first formal role in food policy. In that post, which is based in Rome, she has been part of a small cadre of U.S. diplomats working to limit the damage from Russia’s war in Ukraine, which has sent global food prices sky-rocketing and threatened to destabilize dozens of fragile countries already on the brink of widespread hunger. McCain described her initial months in the job as “a baptism by fire,” in an interview with POLITICO last year.


Read more: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/01/cindy-mccain-world-food-program-00084996

BALTIMORE — President Joe Biden took a victory lap with House Democrats at their yearly retreat with one clear message: Let’s tout our legislative wins.

Biden stopped by the Democrats’ yearly retreat, this time in Baltimore, where he listed off all their accomplishments in the 117th Congress, when Democrats held both chambers.

“It’s been one of the most successful, united caucuses we have ever seen. And you all stick together. Thank god, look what’s already happened,” Biden said with a smile and to cheers from the assembled lawmakers.

In his nearly half-hour speech, he later told Democrats exactly what they were hoping to hear: “I promised to partner with you and coordinate with you to make sure the implementation of these laws is done efficiently and effectively, and let the American people know who did it. As they feel the benefits of the investment, you did it.”

I’m the Democratic Mayor of Roselle Park, New Jersey. Today, I’m launching my campaign for U.S. Senate against Bob Menendez in the Democratic primary election in 2024.

Simply put, Bob Menendez is a corrupt embarrassment to the voters of the state of New Jersey. For the last decade, we’ve had no other options – nobody’s been willing to step up to run a challenger campaign against him.

I’m no stranger to running in tough races, and this is going to be my toughest race yet.

In 2018, I won my first race for Mayor and flipped my hometown of Roselle Park from red to blue. I’ve worked with folks from every corner of our municipality to achieve historic tax reductions for working families, rehabilitate the local economy, and pioneer new community policing methods.

Anyone who’s been paying attention to New Jersey politics can see the glaring gap between what people want in their elected officials… and what we get. Bob Menendez is a prime example of an epidemic of failed leadership and the brand of politics killing the Democratic Party. His disregard for the law and ethics make him a weak sitting Senator, who is painfully vulnerable to the Republican nominee in 2024.

I have a vision for a Democratic Party that’s adept and realistic about how we use our power in the Senate – one that can banish the filibuster for good, pass Medicare for All, cancel student debt, and root out blatant corruption in our government.

One day after news networks declared President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, his campaign had a request for the Proud Boys: Members of the extremist group should attend rallies pushing Trump’s false claim that the election was stolen — but not in their recognizable black-and-yellow gear.

“The campaign asked us to not wear colors to these events,” Proud Boys leader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio told one of his closest deputies in an encrypted Nov. 8, 2020, chat, according to court evidence.

Eight weeks later and days before Jan. 6, 2021, the Proud Boys chairman confided further to multiple girlfriends about members’ preparations for violence and the possibility of storming the Capitol.

“Whatever happens … make it a spectacle,” the 39-year-old Miami-born Cuban American said in a final text to another lieutenant and co-defendant as police arrested Tarrio on his arrival in D.C. on Jan. 4, government exhibits and testimony show.