MMR November 16 2023 - Watermelon Sugar

WASHINGTON – House lawmakers abruptly went home a day early partially due to a familiar sight for the House Republican conference: a rebellion from the lower chamber’s most conservative lawmakers.



The quick departure came just one day after passing a short-term stopgap measure to avert a government shutdown.



Some 19 Republicans, mostly comprised of members of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, tanked a procedural vote Wednesday morning. The procedural vote – referred to as a rule vote – has traditionally passed along party lines regardless of any member’s support or opposition to the bill’s rule.



House conservatives, however, have broken that precedent multiple times this year, illustrating how unwieldy the deeply divided GOP majority is for newly installed House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La.



Hard-right lawmakers shot down the rule vote this time around partly out of retaliation for Johnson’s funding plan – referred to as a continuing resolution – that cleared the House Tuesday. Those members have clamored for past months that any funding legislation include deep spending cuts, but Johnson’s bill was considered “clean” for retaining government funding at current levels.



Among their other grievances was opposition to a slate of amendments on one of the 12 appropriations bills needed to fund the government long-term.



“There’s certainly a concern with the bill itself in addition to concern relative to what happened with the (continuing resolution) yesterday,” said Rep. Bob Good, R-Va., a member of the Freedom Caucus who voted against the rule.



Chair of the Freedom Caucus, Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., contended that he and his conservative colleagues killed the rule vote out of “good faith” in pursuit of conservative policy wins.

KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip (AP) — Israeli forces dropped leaflets warning Palestinians to flee parts of southern Gaza, residents said Thursday, signaling a possible expansion of their offensive to the zone where most of the territory's population has fled to escape Israel’s bombardment and ground assault.



Meanwhile, soldiers continued searching Shifa Hospital in the north, in a raid that began early Wednesday. They displayed guns they say were found hidden in one building, but have yet to release any evidence of the central Hamas command center that Israel has said is concealed beneath the complex. Hamas and staff at the hospital, Gaza's largest, deny the allegations.

León Krauze, one of the most prominent anchors at Univision’s news division, has left the network in the wake of a controversial interview with former President Donald Trump that took place last week and has spurred concerns among journalists at the company that the Spanish-language media giant is no longer challenging Republican politicians.



Krauze, who spent a significant chunk of his career anchoring Univision’s KMEX weeknight news program, became co-anchor of the the company’s national late-night news program “Noticiero Univision Edición Nocturna” in January of 2022.


Democrats were alarmed by the interview, which wasn’t as confrontational as exchanges the news division has had with Republican politicians in the past. The Washington Post reported earlier this week that Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, helped arrange the event. The Latino vote is highly desired by both parties and seen in some sectors as being up for grabs in the 2024 election, with some parts of the U.S. Spanish-speaking population showing favor for Trump and Republicans in recent elections.



Grupo Televisa, the Mexican media company that merged with Univision in 2021, has been known for cultivating relationships with political leaders in Mexico.



“TelevisaUnivision expresses our heartfelt gratitude for the outstanding contributions, expertise, and insightful analyses delivered by Leon Krauze throughout his tenure with our news division,” the company said in a statement, without elaborating on the reasons for his departure. “We sincerely appreciate his dedicated efforts in empowering and informing Hispanic communities at both the national and local levels for over a decade. We extend our best wishes to Leon in all his future professional endeavors.”



One person familiar with the company suggested Krauze’s departure could be tied to layoffs within the merged entity.



But the anchor made no allusions to such dynamics in a statement he released Wednesday evening. “I want to thank our audience, the millions of Latino families whom I’ve had the honor of serving throughout these years,” he said. “My unwavering commitment, past, present, and future, is to journalism that amplifies the voices and illuminates the stories of those who so often go unheard and unseen.

That will remain my guiding principle.”

Kari Lake is finally ready to move on from the 2022 election — or at least she wants her rivals to.



The Arizona Republican has given up — for now — the fire-and-brimstone approach she took in her failed gubernatorial bid last year, adopting a different tack in her current Senate campaign: diplomacy.



Lake has begun reaching out to Republicans she attacked last year, trying to mend the relationships she shredded. Whether she can repair the damage from 2022 — or if her attempts to do so will anger her loyal base — could determine how she fares in a potentially messy three-way race for Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s seat.



Her biggest attempted detente so far is with Karrin Taylor Robson, her 2022 primary opponent whom she once strongly insinuated was a gold digger using her husband’s money to try to buy Arizona’s governorship.



Lake and Robson met in Phoenix in late October to discuss putting their 2022 race behind them and they agreed to stay in contact, according to two people familiar with the discussions who were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss them. A person close to Lake described the conversation as “productive” while a person close to Robson called it “cordial."



It’s a sharp pivot after a brutal midterm in which Lake bragged after her primary win that she “drove a stake through the heart of the McCain machine,” told an opponent he was “okay with special needs kids being” sexually assaulted and tweeted that Robson was “trying to buy the election with her 95-yr-old husband’s millions.”

An attorney for one of former President Donald Trump's co-defendants in the Fulton County district attorney's 2020 election interference case admitted at a hearing Wednesday that he had shared witness proffer videos of key figures in the case with a media outlet, saying he thought it was in his client's interest to do so.



Jonathan Miller, an attorney for Misty Hampton, made the confession during an emergency hearing for a protective order that was prompted by the publication of parts of the video statements of Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis, Kenneth Chesebro and Scott Hall by ABC News and The Washington Post. The judge said he would issue a protective order barring the disclosure of certain discovery information by Thursday morning.

Agreeing with an antisemitic post on his social media platform X, Elon Musk endorsed the claim that Jewish communities push “hatred against Whites.”



An X post Wednesday afternoon said: “Jewish communties (sic) have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.” The post also referenced “hordes of minorities” flooding Western countries, a popular antisemitic conspiracy theory.



In response, Musk said: “You have said the actual truth.”