As many as six Senate Republicans, perhaps more, are currently not comfortable supporting Hegseth's bid to lead the Pentagon as new revelations about the former Fox News anchor's past continue to be made public, three Republican sources with direct knowledge of his nomination process tell NBC News. Given Republicans' slim Senate majority in the next Congress, Hegseth can only afford to lose three GOP votes, assuming all Democrats vote against him.
Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, who sits on the Armed Services Committee would not commit to supporting Hegseth's nomination and said she planned to grill the former cable news host about news accounts of his alleged alcohol abuse, mistreatment of woman and financial mismanagement.
“We’re just going to have a really frank and thorough conversation,” Ernst said of Hegseth’s nomination process.
Hegseth, an Army National Guard veteran, was accused of sexually assaulting a woman in California in 2017, according to a police report made public after Trump announced he would nominate the former Fox host for defense secretary. Hegseth was not charged and denied the woman's allegations, stating the encounter was consensual, although he did pay an undisclosed amount as part of a settlement with her.
Separately, NBC News reported on Tuesday that Hegseth's drinking concerned his colleagues at Fox News, according to 10 current and former Fox employees. Two of them said that Hegseth smelled of alcohol before he went on air on more than a dozen occasions.
More details emerged over the weekend about the sexual assault claim against Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for secretary of defense.
The WaPo was first with extensive new information about the circumstance of the alleged sexual assault, based on (i) a memo it obtained that was provided to the Trump transition team late Wednesday by a friend of the victim; and (ii) a statement from Hegseth’s lawyer, Timothy Parlatore.
The woman later reported the alleged assault to police, but no charges were ever filed:
According to the police statement, the complaint was filed four days after the encounter, and the complainant had bruises to her thigh. The police report itself was not released.
Hegseth settled the woman’s claim for an undisclosed amount, and she signed a nondisclosure agreement.
Trump is standing by Hegseth in the face of the undisclosed settlement of the sexual assault claim.
Panetta, who led the Department of Defense under President Obama from mid-2011 through early 2013, stressed the need for the incoming Secretary of Defense to possess both the "personal characteristics" and leadership experience necessary to oversee an agency of nearly 3 million employees.
Here's C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"
And it was Trump himself, of course, on election night, who was the first to push this grandiose and self-serving falsehood, calling his win “a political victory that our country has never seen before” and claiming “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate”.
Republican politicians, masters of message discipline, quickly followed suit. The representative Elise Stefanik called his win a “historic landslide” while the senator John Barrasso called Trump’s a “huge landslide”. “On November 5 voters decisively elected Donald Trump with a mandate for sweeping change, and they deserve to get it,” wrote the “Doge” co-heads Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in the Wall Street Journal on 20 November.
None of this is true. Yes, Trump won the popular vote and the electoral college. Yes, Republicans won the Senate and the House. But, contrary to both Republican talking points and breathless headlines and hot takes from leading media outlets (“resounding”, “rout”, “runaway win”), there was really nothing at all historic or huge about the margin of victory.
Repeat after me: there was no “landslide”. There was no “blowout”. There was no “sweeping” mandate given to Trump by the electorate. The numbers don’t lie.
First, consider the popular vote. Yes, Trump became the first Republican for two decades to win the popular vote. However, per results from CNN, the Cook Political Report, and the New York Times, he did not win a majority of the vote. Barack Obama did in both 2008 and 2012. Joe Biden did in 2020. But Donald Trump failed to do so in 2024.
And the former president’s margin of victory over Harris is a miniscule 1.6 percentage points, “smaller than that of every winning president since 1888 other than two: John F Kennedy in 1960 and Richard M. Nixon in 1968”, as an analysis in the New York Times noted last month. In fact, in the 55 presidential elections in which the popular vote winner became president, 49 of them were won with a margin bigger than Trump’s in 2024.
Newsweek has emailed Schriver for comment.
This is not the first time that Schiver has sparked conversation after posting on social media. Earlier this year, Schriver posted about "the great replacement," a racist conspiracy theory, to his social media, resulting in him being removed from the House Natural Resources, Environment, Tourism, and Outdoor Recreation committee as a punishment.
Schriver's post on X, which was originally created by right wing figure Jack Posobiec, showed a map of the world featuring white human figures over the U.S., Europe and Australia and black human figures across the rest of the map with the text "The great replacement!"
The "great replacement" is a conspiracy theory that white people are being overthrown and "replaced" by people of color. It has been used by violent extremists, and has been cited as leading to the 2022 mass shooting in Buffalo, the 2019 mosque shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the 2018 mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.
Now let's wind down with, you guessed it, COMMON DREAMS. Yes, them again. Yes, Jake Johnson again. The article is entitled "." One thing you have to understand about COMMON DREAMS is that they have no common sense when it comes to Senator Bernie Sanders. They lust after him so, we're surprised that they have yet to feature Bernie in a tasteful nude pictorial.
There's never a moment of Bernie that COMMON DREAMS doesn't rush to celebrate -- not a single moment in Bernie's long list of one non-accomplishment after another. He's on the verge of serving his 34th year in Congress and yet there are current members of the Congress who will be starting their third year next month and can point to actual accomplishments.
That some idiot thought an 83-year-old man was going to start a new political party was bad enough but that they thought it would be do-nothing Bernie is much, much worse.
And while it would be great if COMMON DREAMS could stop acting like TMZ and also stop pretending Bernie was Drake, that's not the worst of it.
This is:
The senator said the upstart campaign of Independent Dan Osborn—a union steamfitter who launched an unexpectedly close challenge to two-term Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) while shunning the state's Democratic establishment—"should be looked at as a model for the future."
"He took on both political parties," Sanders said of Osborn, who outperformed Vice President Kamala Harris by 14 percentage points in Nebraska and is now launching a PAC aimed at helping working-class candidates run for office.
"He took on the corporate world," Sanders continued. "He ran as a strong trade unionist. Without party support, getting heavily outspent, he got through to working-class people all over Nebraska. It was an extraordinary campaign, and it tells me that the American people are sick and tired of seeing the rich getting richer. They think billionaires dominate both political parties. They want real change, and Dan's campaign raised those issues in a very significant way."
Wow. At last, a path forward for the party! At last, no faux nonsense that's really an attempt to push the Dems to the right.
Oh.
Wait.
That's exactly what Bernie's doing (yet again) and what COMMON DREAMS is enabling them.
Who's the moron from Nebraska? We don't know. We're not Bernie groupies. So we looked him up. And found one unimpressive detail after another as well as the fact that Bernie's yet again lying. We could provide multiple examples but we think Jacob Crosse, at WSWS, did it better than we ever could:
Sanders presents Osborn as a champion of the working class in opposition to both the Democrats and Republicans, when the reality is the opposite. Prior to running for Senate, Osborn was the president of Local 50G of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union (BCTGM) in Omaha, Nebraska. Throughout his Senate campaign, Osborn touted his stint as a union bureaucrat to posture as a friend of the working class.
However, Osborn used his role not to fight for the workers against the corporation, but to strangle their struggle and impose a pro-company sellout. During the 2021 Kellogg’s strike, Osborn waged a national chauvinist campaign to keep striking workers in the US isolated from their class brothers and sisters internationally.
In a broadside against Mexican workers, Osborn said in an interview at the time:
A lot of Americans probably don’t have too much issue with the Nike or Under Armor hats being made elsewhere, or even our vehicles, but when they start manufacturing our food down where they are out of the FDA control and OSHA control, I have a huge problem with that.
In a preview of his anti-immigrant Senate run, he campaigned for a boycott of “made-in-Mexico Nabisco products.”
After
the workers had struck for 77 days, Osborn helped Kellogg’s push
through a contract betrayal that expanded the hated “two-tier” wage and
benefits system and led to the closure of the Omaha plant and destruction of 550 jobs.
The
Democrats failed to field a candidate and Osborn only narrowly lost his
Senate race against incumbent Republican Deb Fischer. In the course of
his campaign, Osborn never once pointed out Trump’s fascist politics or
condemned him for having tried to overturn the 2020 election. Instead,
Osborn solidarized himself with Trump and claimed “Fischer stabbed Donald Trump in the back” for calling on Trump to drop out of the presidential race in 2016.
During
and following his campaign, Osborn pledged to work with Trump to
“secure the border,” including through the completion of Trump’s border
wall.
[. . .]
In addition to Sanders, those endorsing Osborn’s anti-communist, anti-immigrant, pro-bureaucracy campaign include Jacobin founder Bhaskar Sunkara and elements of the trade union bureaucracy, such as United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain and Dustin Guastella, director of operations for Teamsters Local 623.
In a November 22 article published in the Guardian, Sunkara and Guastella praised “Osborn’s ideas” and his “class background,” which, they wrote, “was key to his being able to deliver a credible populist appeal.”
Sunkara and Guastella called on the nationalist labor bureaucracies to recruit “talented candidates” and work with “organizations like Osborn’s to get these candidates the funds they need to win elections.”
The “organization” to which Sunkara and Guastella were referring is Osborn’s political action committee (PAC), known as the “Working Class Heroes Fund.” The PAC, which allows anonymous donors, raised nearly $8 million by mid-October, according to the Nebraska Examiner, which noted that Osborn “benefited from roughly $20 million in outside spending on his behalf” during the campaign.The “about” section on the Working Class Heroes Fund website explains that the purpose of the PAC is provide money for politicians to get elected and unite “the working class across party lines.” In other words, to forge pro-imperialist “national unity.”
Get it?
We're being tricked and lied to over and over by a left media that wants our money, that wants us to donate to them. A left media that rightly calls out Mika and Joe but we'll never, ever own up to their own mistakes. Congratulations to MEDIASTOUCH NEWS which is setting new streaming records and to other YOUTUBERS such as TABITHA SPEAKS, COACH D and Danielle Moodie who are increasing their subscribers due to strong and important work. But the bulk of left media is being produced by idiots who, forget actual research, can't even carry out a basic GOOGLE search. It has to stop and, if it doesn't, maybe it's time for Americans to join together in a class action lawsuit against this continued journalistic malpractice.
Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) wrote a letter to President Joe Biden and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, urging them to issue a policy directive prohibiting the mobilization of active duty military or federalizing National Guard personnel to be deployed against Americans unless specifically authorized.
This comes after President-elect Trump recently indicated that he could invoke the Insurrection Act “on his first day in office.” He has called his political opponents “the enemy from within” and said they “should be very easily handled by — if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.” When asked to clarify these remarks in late October, Vice President-elect J.D. Vance reiterated that President-elect Trump would use force against Americans.
The senators asked for the directive to state the Insurrection Act should be narrowly applied and that the President must consult with Congress to the maximum extent practicable. The senators also point out the urgent need for this policy directive given questions raised by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Trump v. United States decision, which significantly expanded presidential immunity for official acts.
“Given the disagreement amongst scholars on the serious implications of the recent Supreme Court decision, it is reasonable to assume that service members, other DoD personnel, and the broader military community may not be aware of or fully understand their rights and responsibilities,” wrote the senators. “If unaddressed, any ambiguity on the lawful use of military force, coupled with President-elect Trump’s demonstrated intent to utilize the military in such dangerous and unprecedented ways, may prove to be devastating.”
Specifically, the senators are urging President Biden to issue a policy directive that includes that:
- The narrow application of the Insurrection Act should be limited to instances when State or local authorities are so overwhelmed and that the chief executive of the State requests assistance or attacks against the U.S. government overwhelm State or local authorities;
- In instances when federal forces are necessary to protect or prevent violations of individuals’ civil liberties, federal forces should only be authorized when state, local, or federal civilian law enforcement personnel are unable, fail, or refuse to protect their rights;
- Any armed forces employed must operate under the Standing Rules for the Use of Force and cannot violate the writ of habeas corpus, federal law, or where applicable, federal or state law;
- The President must consult with Congress to the maximum extent practicable before exercising this authority, as well as transmit to the Federal Register the legal authorities.
“As many of us wrote previously, ‘it is antithetical to what those in uniform have sworn to protect and defend, and a serious threat to our democratic system’ to weaponize the military to advance the president’s political interests,” wrote the senators.
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