Blueberry desserts to make this summer
HOUSTON – Happy blueberry season! Chef Carl Walker, general manager at Brennan’s of Houston, recently stopped by Houston Life to share some of his family’s favorite recipes starring blueberries. Walker has a special connection to blueberries. B…
#dining #cooking #diet #food #RecipeTopics #Brennan'sofHouston #Cooking #Dessert #family #MoorheadBlueberryFarm #recipe #Recipes
https://www.diningandcooking.com/2133716/blueberry-desserts-to-make-this-summer/
Coaching Scanlons! Brennan and Jim Scanlon meet up in Lincoln summer basketball league https://www.rawchili.com/nba/106444/ #Basketball #Brennan #coaching #Jim #Lincoln #Scanlon #Sedalia #SmithCotton
Ex-#CIA director John #Brennan calls Donald #Trump's plan in #Ukraine 'naive' and 'unsophisticated'
"I think that Donald Trump doesn't know what he will do."
𝗩𝗶𝘀𝗺𝗮-𝘁𝗮𝗹𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗕𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗻𝗮𝗻 𝘄𝗶𝗻𝘁 𝗼𝗼𝗸 𝘄𝗶𝗲𝗹𝗲𝗿𝗸𝗼𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗥𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝘂𝗺 𝗞ö𝗹𝗻
De Britse wielrenner Matthew Brennan heeft de Duitse koers Rund um Köln gewonnen. Het was voor de pas 19-jarige renner van Visma - Lease a Bike al de vijfde zege van het seizoen. Brennan hield na 181 kilometer in de massasprint de Eritreeër Biniam Girmay en de Israëliër Itamar Einhorn achter zich.
Margaret Brennan interviews Ukraine Special Envoy Keith Kellogg
Margaret Brennan interviews Ukraine Special Envoy Keith Kellogg - CBS News Watch CBS News "Face the Nation" moderator and CBS Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Margaret Brennan in conversation with Trump Administration Special Envoy for Ukraine Keith Kellogg. Be the first to know Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting. Not Now Turn On #Margaret #Brennan…
https://10bmnews.com/2025/03/margaret-brennan-interviews-ukraine-special-envoy-keith-kellogg/
A couple of quotes on 'identity politics' from Timothy #Brennan, which you may find relevant.
'...so [Hardt and Negri's] Deleuzian flight from a transcendent and tainted dialectics turns out to be indistinguishable from American functionalism--moreover, an idealist utilitarianism at that, justified in the name of a "toolbox." #Brennan
Pildes, the NYU professor, said that while he was concerned about efforts to block certification at the local level,
he was confident that state courts could resolve any disputes by the time the electors meet.
A new law, the 🔸Electoral Count Reform Act🔸, should provide a significant new layer of protection against election subversion.
The bipartisan bill passed Congress at the end of 2022.
The law makes it so that Trump and his allies cannot repeat what they did in 2020 and submit false slates of electors from key swing states.
Significantly, it says that the slate of electors submitted by a state’s executive is the legitimate slate and raises the threshold in both houses of Congress to object to the electoral result.
While the law controls what Congress must do once it receives certificates from electors,
it doesn’t have much to say about what must happen in the lead-up to the electoral college vote.
🔥That could leave a lot of wriggle room for Trump and allies to try to slow down certification and go to court to try to force states to miss their certification deadline.
After Donald Trump nearly succeeded in overturning the 2020 election, ❓is the US better prepared to stop a similar effort in 2024?❓
Lawyers and other activists say they are ready, having spent the last four years studying and understanding the vulnerabilities that Trump and allies targeted in 2020.
Any effort to block certification is likely to be swiftly challenged in courts,
where Trump has already been unsuccessful dozens of times.
The new Electoral Count Reform Act should offer additional safeguards should there be an effort such as there was in 2020 to get Congress to stop its certification of the vote
Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss the threat altogether.
The same pressure points that existed in 2020 exist in 2024,
and in some places election deniers have been elevated to positions of power.
“This has started earlier in the cycle and is louder and is more consistent,” said Morales-Doyle of the Brennan Center.
“That is all just at a different level than it was before 2020.”
(5/5)
#Aguilar #timeline #misleading #evidence #affidavits #county #boards #refused #reversed #Brennan #Center #Protect #Democracy #Howell #HeritageFoundation #network #Bobb #poll #observers #Elias #Giuliani #Ellis #Powell
Since 2020, there have been at least 20 instances in eight states of election officials refusing to certify election results.
The first red flag came in 2022, when county commissioners in 🔹Otero county, New Mexico, refused to certify the results of a primary election,
citing vague concerns about voting equipment.
The secretary of state eventually went to court to force the commissioners to certify the election.
In July of this year, two Republicans on the county commission in 🔹Washoe county, Nevada
– a key county in a battleground state
– refused to certify its primary vote, setting off alarms.
The commissioners who refused to certify eventually reversed themselves.
Nevada’s secretary of state, Cisco #Aguilar, has since asked the state supreme court to clarify that county commissioners have an obligation to certify votes.
Sometimes election officials who refuse to certify have pointed to mistakes that happened during the election, even though they did not affect the outcome.
In other cases, like Adams’s in Georgia, officials have refused to certify to protest about what they view as unfair laws.
While courts would probably force recalcitrant officials to certify the vote, significant damage could still be caused.
“You can force certification through legal mechanisms, [but] those events tend to be like rocket fuel for conspiracy theories and misinformation and undermining confidence in the election.
So there’s damage done even where certification is eventually forced,” said Berwick, the "Protect Democracy" lawyer.
The #timeline for certifying the vote is important because,
under federal law,
👉states must have an official election result by 11 December,
six days before the electoral college meets.
💥Delaying certification efforts at the local level could put states at risk of missing that deadline.
“If we get past that deadline, it opens up a lot of questions, like tricky legal questions and room for shenanigans,” Berwick said.
(4/N)
#misleading #evidence #affidavits #county #boards #refused #reversed #Brennan #Center #Protect #Democracy #Howell #HeritageFoundation #network #Bobb #poll #observers #Elias #Giuliani #Ellis #Powell
Any effort to challenge the election results will probably start at the local level.
Just as there was in 2020, there’s likely to be a period of uncertainty after election day when votes are still being counted in key swing states.
Two of those, 🔹Wisconsin and 🔹Pennsylvania, still do not allow election officials to begin to process mail-in ballots until election day.
“I’m definitely concerned that you’re gonna have a lot of efforts to disturb the process of counting those votes, if we go into the late evening, early hours of the next day and all of that,”
said Richard Pildes, a professor at New York University who specializes in election law.
The observers amassed by Cleta Mitchell and the RNC could have a significant role.
In 2020, chaotic confrontations at polling sites offered #misleading #evidence
that Trump and allies used in their effort to try to overturn the election.
Trump’s effort to challenge the election results in 🔹Arizona, for example, was undergirded by #affidavits from observers and poll watchers who falsely claimed they saw ballots being
❌ rejected because of the type of pen voters were using.
In 🔹Georgia, Trump pointed to reports from observers in Atlanta falsely claiming they were
❌removed from the facility where mail-in ballots were counted.
In 🔹Michigan, Trump’s team used as evidence an “incident report” from an election observer who falsely said she heard workers giving instructions to
❌ count a rejected ballot.
Accusations of fraud may find a receptive audience at #county #boards responsible for certifying elections.
Until 2020, no one gave much thought to these positions, sometimes filled by elected officials and other times by little-known party loyalists.
In 2020, Trump’s campaign made a strong effort to try to ⚠️delay certification at the local and state level as part of his effort to overturn the election.
In Wayne county, home of 🔹Detroit, Trump personally called two Republican canvassers on the board responsible for certifying the vote there. The two officials ⚠️briefly #refused to certify, then #reversed themselves and did.
At the state level, Aaron Van Langevelde, a Republican on the state board of canvassers, faced ⚠️pressure not to certify the vote, but decided to anyway.
In 🔹Wisconsin, Republicans nearly got the state supreme court to ⚠️block certification of the state’s election.
In 🔹Arizona, Trump called the then governor, Doug Ducey, as he was certifying the vote amid a pressure campaign to ⚠️stop the certification of votes there.
(3/N)
#Brennan #Center #Protect #Democracy #Howell #HeritageFoundation #network #Bobb #poll #observers #Elias #Giuliani #Ellis #Powell
This year, Americans are unlikely to use mail-in voting at the same levels they did during the pandemic,
and Republicans are now encouraging their supporters to take advantage of it.
But Trump and allies are using a new messaging tactic in its place:
that there are scores of non-citizens and other ineligible people on the voter rolls.
Cleta Mitchell has played a key role in leading a coalition of groups that has pushed the
💥false idea that there is a serious threat of non-citizens voting in US elections. 💥
Her coalition has supported federal legislation championed by the House speaker, Mike Johnson,
and others to require proof of citizenship when registering to vote.
Such a restriction would probably do little to prevent fraud,
which is exceedingly rare.
⭐️Instead, it would probably make it harder for millions of eligible voters to cast a ballot.
💥Nearly one in 10 eligible voters
– 21 million Americans
– lack easy access to proof of citizenship documents, 💥
according to one study released earlier this year.
Even though Johnson’s congressional bill passed the House,
it will probably go nowhere in the Senate.
But it helps create an impression that something is amiss with American elections.
To make matters worse, when Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden at the top of the ticket,
Republicans also immediately sought to suggest her candidacy was illegitimate,
calling the effort a “coup”.
A constellation of groups
– including the RNC, the Public Interest Legal Foundation and United Sovereign Americans
– has also filed several lawsuits in various states to create the
♦️ false impression that voter rolls are not properly being cleaned ♦️in several swing states.
These lawsuits use misleading methodology and legal claims to suggest that there are a suspiciously large number of people registered in certain jurisdictions.
Among other issues, they compare up-to-date voter registration information and outdated data from the American Community Survey.
“They’re hanging the hooks to later hang their hat on,” said Sean Morales-Doyle,
the top voting rights expert at the #Brennan #Center.
“It’s all part of creating sort of a pretext to say,
‘Oh, we need to throw out this set of ballots’
or ‘We can’t really know who the real winner is,’”
said Ben Berwick, a lawyer at the non-profit "#Protect #Democracy"
who works on voting rights issues.
“I think much of it won’t stick, but I think the point is to have enough of it stick to create enough uncertainty for that critical post-election period
(2/N)
#Howell #HeritageFoundation #network #Bobb #poll #observers #Elias #Giuliani #Ellis #Powell
This man is genius.
Brennan Destroys Elon Musk
https://youtube.com/watch?v=nn8HxLy0BHA&si=INro7LIzQU1dbkkb
At the core of the taskforce’s operations are criminal prosecutions of the most serious threats against election staff and volunteers.
In almost three years, the unit has prosecuted 16 cases involving 18 defendants, two of whom are women.
Ten perpetrators have so far been sentenced, with punishments ranging from 30 days to 3.5 years in prison. A further three people have pleaded guilty, and five have been charged and are awaiting plea deals or trials.
One of the striking features of the taskforce is the relatively few cases it has prosecuted compared with the mountain of hostile communications that has been dumped on the election community in the Trump era.
In its early stages, the unit invited election offices around the country to forward all the offensive material to its Washington headquarters and was inundated with thousands of obscene, abusive and hostile messages.
But when it pored over the reports it found that up to 95% of them failed to meet the threshold for conducting even a criminal investigation, let alone prosecution.
That standard was set by the US supreme court in the 2003 ruling 💥Virginia v Black, 💥which weighed the need to shield public servants from criminal threats of violence against the robust protections for political speech under the first amendment of the US constitution.
The court’s conclusion was that for a communication to be a crime it has to be a “#true #threat”.
The justices defined that as a “serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence”.
Most of the messages reviewed by the taskforce were distressing and inappropriate, certainly, but in its analysis fell short of that criminal bar.
They were indirect rather than direct, implicit rather than explicit, ambiguous and aspirational rather than an active statement of intent to carry out illegal violence.
“The difference between what is criminally actionable, and what feels like a threat to an election administrator on the ground, is an inherent problem in this space. What is potentially actionable is closer to dozens of cases, compared with the thousands of hostile communications we have received,” Keller said.
US election workers face thousands of threats – so why so few prosecutions?
The US Department of Justice circulated a memo to all federal prosecutors and FBI agents. There had been a “significant increase in the threat of violence against Americans who administer free and fair elections”, the memo said.
The increase in threats amounted to “a threat to democracy. We will promptly and vigorously prosecute offenders.”
The memo announced the formation of a new unit within the justice department, the #election #threats #taskforce.
Its job was to respond to a phenomenon that had barely existed before Trump unleashed his 2020 stolen election lie
– violent and abusive messages, including death threats, specifically targeting election officials and their families.
The taskforce was devised as a crack multi-disciplinary team bringing together experts from across the justice department and linking them with local FBI and US attorney offices.
Its mission: to protect election officials from the intimidation let loose by Trump, by coming down hard on perpetrators.
As the November presidential election fast approaches, the taskforce faces its greatest challenge. With Trump back on the ballot, and with swing states such as Arizona continuing to be roiled by election denial, the federal unit is at the frontlines of what promises to be a combustible election year.
Much is riding on it.
The #Brennan #Center, a non-partisan law and policy institute, has estimated that since 2020, three election officials have quit their jobs on average every two days
– that’s equivalent to about one in five of those who run US elections nationwide bowing out in the face of toxic hostility.
So, asking again:
💥why so few prosecutions? 💥
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/31/new-election-threats-taskforce-trump-subversion?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
ℹ Former #CIA Director #JohnBrennan told Jen Psaki of #MSNBC #NEWS, that it was "incomprehensible" that #Hamas was able to carry out an attack on #Israel.
#Brennan said that it was possible #Israeli #intelligence sources were compromised and may have provided #misinformation to #Israel.
#Feinstein, whodenied #Brennan’s charges, gave a dramatic speech on the #Senate floor in which she accused the #CIA of improperly searching computers used by her staff members & seeking to #intimidate them w/ calls for a #DOJ review of their conduct. An internal CIA investigation later supported those claims, & #Brennan apologized.
Then-CIA Dir John #Brennan insisted that the #interrogation techniques “did produce intelligence that helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists, & save lives.” He & #Feinstein had earlier faced off in a high-stakes confrontation when Brennan accused cmte investigators of improperly obtaining materials from a #CIA computer network.
