2025 Is Off To A Rocky Start

1.2.25

Ally Sammarco Jan 3

Happy New Year and welcome back to Today’s American News, your source of news and analysis for the circus that is American politics and entertainment. Let’s get started.

New Orleans attack shocks nation, delays Sugar Bowl… The devastating New Years Day attack in the Big Easy is a fast developing story. Follow CNN’s live updates here. We stand with New Orleans.

Republicans already looking past Johnson as Speaker vote looms… By all accounts, Speaker Mike Johnson still has the votes to maintain speakership in his increasingly narrow Republican House majority. But his party’s speaker votes are always full of drama and the Louisianan has already lost the vote of one fellow Republican. As Johnson is set to navigate difficult terrain of keeping the government open and maintaining the full faith and credit of the United States, trouble looms. Politico names three potential replacements, none of whom have the votes to replace Johnson: Majority Leader Steve Scalise of Louisiana, Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan of Ohio and GOP Whip Tom Emmer of Minnesota.

Liz Cheney, Bennie Johnson receive Presidential Citizens Medal… Congressional odd couple Liz Cheney and Bennie Johnson, who led the January 6 Committee and formed an unlikely friendship, were reunited today at the White House as they received the Congressional Citizens Medal from President Biden. It marked Cheney’s first appearance since campaigning for Vice President Harris. Cheney is a frequent and continuing recipient of MAGA’s wrath, and plans are in motion by Donald Trump’s minions to exact retribution on the former Republican member from Wyoming. This won’t help.

Ukraine cuts off Russian pipeline to Europe… If you didn’t realize that Ukraine has continued to allow Russia to pipe oil across its territory throughout the three years of Putin’s so-called “special military operation”, you’re not alone. But that has been the case as the war-torn but heroically standing country has walked a delicate balance with its European neighbors who have supported their country against Russia. The pipeline lease expired yesterday and was not renewed. Russian puppets in Hungary and Slovakia condemned the move, with the latter threatening to cut off electricity supply to Ukraine in retaliation. Poland stepped up immediately and promised to fill in any gap in supply.

Today’s Buzz

Entertainment Weekly previews 2025 show premier dates…Writes the publication, “January alone sees the return of reality TV gem The Traitors, Apple TV+'s hit series Severance, and Netflix's To All The Boys I've Loved Before spinoff series XO, Kitty. If those aren't your jam, there's also The Bachelor, The Night Agent, and a slew of new shows, including Prime Video's take on the cop show, On Call, starring Pretty Little Liars star Troian Bellisario.” View the full list here.

Thanks for reading Today’s American News in the new year. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s edition!

Trump and Fox HUMILIATED after LYING to their Followers

 Thank you Michael! 

The Orange Turd is NOT EVEN IN OFFICE & SPEWING LIES! 

FOX NEWS = FAKE NEWS LIARS regurgitate TRUMP LIES! 

President Biden offers FACTUAL & INFORMED COMMENTS! That's LEADERSHIP! 

I have NOT SHARED articles & information being circulated because too many MEDIA MISFITS are sharing RUMORS & GOSSIP! 

This HYSTERIA jeopardizes us all!  

WAIT FOR FACTS! 

That includes the BIGOTED IMMIGRANT & WHINEY BRAT, QUEEN OF HATE & FABRICATION ELON MUSK!

STOP BELIEVING LIES & MAKING THREATS BASED ON THOSE LIES! You're being MANIPULATED! 

comment: 
I don’t know how much more I can take from this man. It’s impossible to not hear or read something odd, crazy or weird about/from him everyday. President-elect Trump, if you are a normal regular guy, please behave accordingly
reply: 
Normal regular guy?!?! He’s from Planet Chump.

Many feel the same, but SPEAK OUT! The ORANGE TURD only succeeds when we are SILENT! The Orange Turd is DERANGED & the CORPORATE MEDIA failed to report his mental impairments....his FICTIONAL BEST FRIEND HANNIBAL LECTER? DELUSIONS! His irrational rants are uniting our ALLIES flocking to CHINA & RUSSIA! CHINA is leading the World in CHEAP CLEAN SOLAR as Daffy Don embraces DIRTY ENERGY?

Michael Cohen

240K subscribers

Trump and Fox wasted no time yesterday attempting to blame the horrendous attacks in New Orleans on illegal immigrants. Subscribe to Michael's NEW Youtube Channel: @themichaelcohenshow Join us on Patreon:   / politicalbeatdown   Add the Mea Culpa podcast feed: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/mea-c... Add the Political Beatdown podcast feed: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/polit...

Nathan Webster is finally free.

Good evening my friends. I have some good news! Nathan Webster was finally able to go home to his daughter and grandbabies after nearly 28 years incarcerated just for drug possession – and it would not have happened without my brother and Real Justice DA Jason Williams!

Read that slowly. 28 years. For drug possession.

That is 26 years longer than the sentence handed to Kim Potter, the cop who killed Daunte Wright.

I am so grateful to my brother, DA Jason Williams in New Orleans, for helping to set this brother free. We need more leaders like him from coast to coast.

Listen. At this very moment, our Real Justice team is working hard to elect more District Attorneys like Jason, but right now our biggest obstacle is funding.

We’ve suffered a steep decline in our fundraising, and if this continues we will essentially have our hands tied for some of the critical 11 races we have coming up in May and June.

Please help us elect more DAs like my brother Jason Williams ALL over the country by giving your best possible gift. Right now we are just $8,000 short of our goal, and we NEED to hit it before midnight on Thursday.

Police and white folks should not be living above the law – for MURDER – while Black folks get locked up for far longer just for a simple drug charge.

This is one of the reasons that I am dedicating my life to the work we do at Real Justice.

The District Attorneys we helped elect are changing the system from the inside out. And that is exactly why right-wing billionaires and police unions are throwing so much money into attacks against our movement.

That is also why I need you now.

Please make your best gift now so we can elect more DAs who will free people like Nathan Webster – and help us hit our goal before March 31st ends.

Love and appreciate you,

Shaun

Pol. Adv. Paid for by Real Justice PAC, realjusticepac.org

Not authorized by any federal, state, or local candidate or a committee controlled by a candidate.

                                        Email us: info@realjusticepac.org 

The Mount Vernon Police Tapes: In Secretly Recorded Phone Calls, Officers Say Innocent People Were Framed

TomDispatch

As Adam Serwer said of his piece on Twitter today, "American policing is set up to reward officers who commit abuses, and punish those who report them. It’s not a system that can be overcome by the benign intentions of individual cops." Here's how it begins.
—Erika

When the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin dug his knee into the back of George Floyd’s neck for nine minutes while Floyd pleaded for help, he was merely following the president’s advice.

“Please don’t be too nice,” Donald Trump told an audience of police officers on Long Island in 2017, in a speech largely focused on the MS-13 gang. The audience laughed. “When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon, you just see them thrown in, rough. I said, ‘Please don’t be too nice.’”

Floyd’s killing has sparked nationwide protests, despite the fact that the coronavirus outbreak, which has killed more than 100,000 Americans and left 40 million without work, is still killing about 1,000 people a day in the United States. Those Americans who were disproportionately dying from a plague came out in force to protest being murdered by their government. Trump, who ran as the “law and order” candidate, now presides over the very “American carnage” he vowed to end.

A different president might have tried to quell the unrest and unify the nation, but Trump is incapable of that. He cannot rally Americans around a common identity or interest, because his presidency is a rejection of the concept, an affirmation of the conviction that America’s traditional social hierarchies are good and just. He is hardly the first president to embrace those hierarchies as unassailably virtuous, but he is the first in decades to do so openly. Law and order, for this president, simply means that he and his ideological allies are above the law, while others, such as Floyd, are merely subject to it. The chaos sweeping across the United States has many causes, but the one over which the president has the most control is the culture of lawlessness and impunity he has cultivated and embraced. When you attempt to impose “law and order” without justice, you get chaos.

The moral core of the protests is a simple demand: that police who abuse their authority be held accountable, that black Americans be able to live free lives without fearing that they will be cut short by a chance encounter with law enforcement. This demand clashes with the history of the United States, in which the ideal of equal justice coexists uneasily with the tacit understanding of many Americans that guarding the color line is one of law enforcement’s obligations, a commitment that has existed from slavery to the beating of marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, Ronald Reagan blamed the activist for his own murder, hissing that King’s death was the kind of “great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order.”

When a white dog-walker in Central Park threatened to call the police on a black bird-watcher and tell them that “an African American man is threatening my life,” she was leveraging their mutual understanding that the police exist to protect white people from black people. This is why Chauvin and his fellow officers thought nothing of him being videotaped as he dug his knee into Floyd’s neck, and why authorities in Georgia saw no crime in the stalking and killing of Ahmaud Arbery. Integrating police departments was meant to help align law enforcement with its stated ideals, but as in every other area of public policy, correcting centuries of tradition is an arduous task, even if one is sincerely committed to it.

You can make people fear the law at gunpoint, but you cannot make them respect it.

About this website

theatlantic.com

A Nation Without Law, Order, or Justice

You can make people fear the law at gunpoint, but you cannot make them…

You can make people fear the law at gunpoint, but you cannot make them respect it.

LINK

TomDispatch

A report on the New Orleans courts by The Lens on how the DA’s office refused to prosecute nearly half of the felony domestic violence cases in 2019.
—Erika

A new report by the watchdog group Court Watch NOLA reveals that the Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro’s office refused to prosecute 47 percent of felony domestic violence cases in 2019. Late last year the DA received criticism when it was revealed that the office had dropped 83 percent of misdemeanor domestic violence cases in New Orleans Municipal Court in 2018 and 2019.

Simone Levine, director of Court Watch NOLA, said the refusal rates for both misdemeanor and felony cases reflects a broader disregard for victims of crime in the New Orleans criminal justice system.

“I think it sends a simple message. I think that crime victims are simply not being listened to. I don’t think that they are being involved in the process,” Levine said of the refusal rates. “I think that they’re forgotten. I think that they’re forgotten by everyone.”

The section of the report contends that in general crime victims in New Orleans — specifically victims of domestic violence — are not being provided with adequate resources and are often left out of the criminal justice process that is intended to keep them safe.

In newly released report, Court Watch NOLA calls for more resources for victims of domestic violence

About this website

thelensnola.org

DA’s office refused nearly half of felony domestic violence cases last year, watchdog group finds | The Lens

In newly released report, C

TomDispatch

George Joseph at Gothamist has obtained secret recordings of police in Mt. Vernon, NY.
—Erika

In hours of secretly recorded telephone conversations, police officers in Mount Vernon, New York, reveal widespread corruption, brutality and other misconduct in the troubled Westchester County city just north of the Bronx.

Caught on tape by a whistleblower cop, the officers said they witnessed or took part in alarming acts of police misconduct, from framing and beating residents to collaborating with drug dealers, all as part of a culture of impunity within the department’s narcotics unit.

The Mount Vernon police tapes, obtained exclusively by Gothamist/WNYC, were recorded from 2017 to this year by Murashea Bovell, a 12-year veteran of the department who has been blowing the whistle on misconduct for years.

In 2014 and 2015, Bovell reported his colleagues’ alleged corruption and brutality in confidential complaints to the city and a lawsuit against the city, which was dismissed on procedural grounds. But he saw little change, so he began quietly recording his colleagues to substantiate his own claims.

“I need to have something tangible,” he told Gothamist/WNYC. “Something to prove that what I was saying is true, and wouldn’t fall on deaf ears if the time came.”

The tapes are just the latest in a series of public corruption scandals that have rocked the city in recent years. The police department itself has gone through at least five different commissioners since 2015. Bovell sued the city again last year, alleging retaliation for his activities.

Hours of conversations between police officers in Mount Vernon, New York, show a narcotics unit “running rampant” over residents’ rights and safety.

About this website

gothamist.com

The Mount Vernon Police Tapes: In Secretly Recorded Phone Calls, Officers Say Innocent People Were Framed

Hours of conversations between police officers in Mount Vernon, New York, show a narcotics unit “running rampant” over residents’ rights and safety.

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