TV News LIES

Early this month, a single pen stroke effectively ended representative Steve Cohen’s career in Congress. The man who has represented Memphis for 19 years will turn 77 later this month, but he wasn’t planning on retiring. He hadn’t lost any primary. The reason was that his district had been erased around him.

A new electoral map, passed by the Republican-led state legislature and signed by Bill Lee, the governor, divides the ninth district three ways. “Last week Tennessee Republicans silenced the Black vote here in Memphis to make Republican victories likely,” Cohen said in his statement. That’s succinct and accurate.

The new map folds a significant portion of Cohen’s Black constituents into Williamson county, which sits south of Nashville and was, until recently, the subject of a different fight.

To this day, the Williamson county seal depicts a Confederate battle flag draped over a cannon. It was adopted in 1968, at the height of the civil rights movement. A Tennessee court ruled in 2024 that the county could remove it. The state legislature responded the following year by passing a new law specifically designed to keep the flag on the seal. The vote was 70-24 in the House and 27-6 in the Senate, with no Democrats voting in favor. Lee, who is from Williamson county, signed it.

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Congressman Ro Khanna, a progressive Democrat from California thought to be considering a run for the presidency in 2028, joined the criticism of the Democratic National Committee’s reluctantly released, incomplete postmortem on the party’s disastrous 2024 election defeat.

In a social media video, Khanna said: “There’s not a single mention of Gaza in the 192-page DNC autopsy report that was just released today. As someone who campaigned in Michigan and Wisconsin, let me tell you: one of the reasons we lost is our blank check to Israel and Netanyahu while they committed genocide in Gaza. We must speak and confront hard truths if this party is to win in 2028.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic congresswoman from New York many progressives want to run for the presidency in 2028, told reporters she too was stunned by the omission of any mention of Gaza, Israel or the Uncommitted movement in the report.

“I think it’s pretty unbelievable that Gaza would not be mentioned once in the autopsy report,” the congresswoman said. “I think it was very clearly a major dynamic and a major thread that was happening in 2024. Regardless of how one feels about that issue, the fact that it’s not even addressed, I think, is a major oversight.”

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President Donald Trump's long-running explanation for not releasing his tax returns was upended on May 19 when acting Attorney General Todd Blanche issued a Justice Department document that effectively shut down any existing Internal Revenue Service audits, investigations and enforcement actions against Trump, his family and his sprawling business empire.

Since his 2016 campaign, Trump has declined to follow the tradition of U.S. presidents releasing tax returns, saying he couldn't do so because of ongoing IRS audits.

“I may even release my current returns,” Trump told reporters May 20 when stepping off Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland when asked about the agreement between the president and his own administration.

Meghan Faulkner, communications director for the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, called on Trump to release his taxes now that the audits have shut down.

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Two police officers who clashed with rioters at the US Capitol during the January 6 insurrection in 2021 have sued Donald Trump over plans to create a $1.776bn “anti-weaponization” fund.

The fund, which critics have argued is essentially a slush fund, is set to compensate allies of the US president who he claims were victims of prosecutorial overreach.

It was created as part of an agreement in which Trump and his sons dropped a $10bn long-shot lawsuit against the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

Harry Dunn, a retired US Capitol police officer, and Daniel Hodges, a Metropolitan police department officer, filed a complaint in US district court in Washington DC on Tuesday.

“In the most brazen act of presidential corruption this century, President Donald J Trump has created a $1.776bn taxpayer-funded slush fund to finance the insurrectionists and paramilitary groups that commit violence in his name,” the lawsuit says.

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Thousands of Mississippians, along with allies from other southern states, gathered at the state’s War Memorial Building auditorium on Wednesday in support of voting rights. It was the latest in a series of actions protesting the supreme court’s recent decision gutting the provision of the Voting Rights Act preventing racial discrimination, and held on a site integral to the state’s history of Black disenfranchisement.

Section 2 “stopped states, counties, cities, from passing redistricting maps that discriminate against Black voters and it led to the biggest growth of Black political power since Reconstruction”, said Amir Badat, the southern states director at the voting rights group Fair Fight Action.

“And now, the Roberts court has opened the door to the biggest destruction of Black political power since the end of Reconstruction.”

The rally was led by a coalition of organizations, including People’s Advocacy Institute, Mississippi Votes, Mississippi Poor People’s Campaign, One Voice, Fair Fight, Mississippi for a Just World and NAACP, among them. It followed the “All Roads Lead to the South” rally in Montgomery, Alabama, over the weekend.

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Donald Trump displayed his supremacy over the Republican party on Tuesday when voters in northern Kentucky rejected the maverick congressman Thomas Massie in favour of the US president’s hand-picked challenger.

Ed Gallrein, a retired navy Seal and farmer who was recruited into the race by Trump, defeated the seven-term incumbent in a primary election in Kentucky’s fourth congressional district in what the president’s allies framed as a test of whether dissent could still exist inside today’s Republican party.

The election took place as voters in five other states – Pennsylvania, Georgia, Alabama, Oregon and Idaho – went to the polls to decide their nominees for the November general election, in what was the biggest primary night of the year so far.

In Georgia’s gubernatorial race, lieutenant governor Burt Jones and billionaire Rick Jackson advanced to a runoff for the GOP nomination, while former Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms won the Democratic nomination outright. And in Alabama, Trump ally Tommy Tuberville won the Republican primary for governor, while former senator Doug Jones secured the Democratic nomination.

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