Hard Pass

Robert Garcia, set to become oversight chair, vows to take on president while Senator Ron Wyden signals ‘subpoenas’

Robert Garcia, the Democratic congressman set to become the next chair of the oversight committee of the House of Representatives, had two words for Republicans on Tuesday evening: “Lawyer up.”

Garcia issued his statement as a blue wave appeared to take hold across the country after voters cast their ballots in the US midterm elections. Democrats retook control of the US Senate, and are widely expected to do the same in the House.

Ron Wyden, the Democratic senator poised to lead the Senate finance committee, also flexed on his potential future authority. “Subpoenas,” Wyden wrote on X.

With the Senate and House back in Democrats’ control, Garcia, Wyden and other congressional leaders will be able to lead and steer investigations into the US president, his allies and agenda.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.blahaj.zone/c/washington@lemmy.world/p/1064835/wa-voters-upholding-millionaires-tax-in-tuesday-vote

In Washington’s biggest tax fight in decades, voters were backing the state’s new high-earners income tax in Tuesday’s vote count, rejecting an initiative that would repeal it.

Initiative 645, the tax-repeal proposal, was trailing with 58% of voters opposed. The “no” vote was bolstered by a huge margin in Democrat-dominated King County, where 66.5% of voters were against I-645. It also trailed in Snohomish and Pierce counties.

If Tuesday’s result stands, it would mark a tectonic shift in Washington’s tax code, ending the state’s holdout status as one of a handful without an income tax — keeping in place what backers called the “millionaires tax” passed by the Legislature this year.

Courts will likely still have the last word on the tax as a lawsuit challenging its constitutionality is pending.

Hundreds of thousands of ballots remain to be counted in the coming days.

The mood at the No on 645 campaign, at Seattle’s Reverie Ballroom, was upbeat as national results confirmed a good night for Democrats and liberal causes.

Speaking to the crowd, state Senate Majority Leader Jamie Pedersen, D-Seattle, the prime architect of the tax, framed the historic vote as a long-sought win.

“For 93 years, we have been saddled with an anchor around our neck, with a tax system that is bad for working people, that’s bad for small businesses, that’s bad for just about everybody except for the 1%,” he said.

More in the article.

Touching: Darline Graham honors her brother, the late Lindsey Graham, by finishing on bottom

cross-posted from: https://piefed.blahaj.zone/c/us_politics@piefed.blahaj.zone/p/1064790/after-midterm-losses-trump-stares-down-the-specter-of-democratic-probes-and-the-ra

For Donald Trump, his party’s resounding midterm losses pave the way for investigations and potential impeachments that will put the Republican president on the defensive in his final two years in office.

The results shift the center of gravity closer to Capitol Hill, where Democrats will be angling to check Trump’s power after two years of acquiescence from congressional Republicans. It not only resurfaces a dynamic from his first term in office, when House Democrats took power in Trump’s first midterms and ultimately impeached him twice, but with control as well of the Senate, Democrats can now stymie Trump’s nominations to Cabinet posts and lifetime federal judgeships.

Trump had all but guaranteed the results would be seen as a referendum on himself by repeatedly urging voters to “pretend I’m on the ballot” as he went into primarily conservative states to shore up Republican candidates and warned of a Washington where Democrats were in power.

But the results showed how voters rejected Trump’s handpicked candidates while airing widespread concerns about high costs in the wake of his war against Iran and his punishing tariff policy.

Trump tried to shift the blame away from himself during a Fox News interview that aired early Wednesday, saying Democrats “did a good job” in their campaigns and faulting GOP candidates for their losses. “I don’t view it as a hit on me,” he said.

The results leave Trump — who watched returns at the White House with his advisers and members of his Cabinet — with dramatically diminished political capital at home and abroad.

Much more in the article.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/37566765

Democrats of all stripes declared victory on Tuesday night in clearest sign yet voters have had enough of Trumpism

No single Democratic coalition can claim victory after Tuesday’s resounding midterm results – all parts of the Democratic coalition can.

Their wins were so sweeping, so resounding, that factional divisions fail to explain them. This year, the most important thing Democrats had to be to win was, simply, not Republicans.

Trump gave Democrats the political gifts of a deeply unpopular war against Iran that led to rising prices, chaotic tariffs that devastated small businesses, farmers and international alliances, healthcare cuts, a deadly deportation scheme, self-enrichment, corruption, a never-ending debacle over a reflecting pool renovation.

Across wide stretches of the sun-bleached Sonoran desert in Arizona, thousands of retired aircraft sit nose-to-tail in graveyards of metal known as boneyards.

​Many of their engines haven’t been fired up for years. But America’s soaring demand for electricity to power data centers is bringing them back to life.

They don't post very often, but when they do, it's worth it.

Bumfritter!

So-called AI is built on hype and its widespread adoption promises to dehumanize us and wreak environmental havoc. Emily M. Bender, computational linguist and co-author of The AI Con, describes how AI's 'boomers' and 'doomers' are two sides of the same coin - trying to convince us of AI's all-powerful inevitability. Emily points toward a path of refusal of this harmful emergent technology being pushed on us by the world's richest and most powerful, and she offers a vision of how we can resist and begin creating the future we actually want. Highlights include:

Description:

Why the phrase 'artificial intelligence' is just a marketing term used to hype everything from chatbots to image processing systems to facial recognition;

Why the concept of 'intelligence' itself is loaded with eugenics, race science history, and a stunted view of biological beings;

Why large language models (LLMs) in the form of chatbots are devoid of the relational context of subjectivity, care, and conflict which humans use to negotiate their social contexts and which give human language meaning and accountability;

How AI hype plays on FOMO (fear of missing out) and has led everyone from business, government, education, entertainment, and media to thoughtlessly embrace so-called AI at a rapid rate;

How AI hype is used by both AI boomers and doomers to oversell the potential of their technologies and hide the serious environmental and labor harms that AI use is causing right now;

Why so-called AI will likely lead not to a job apocalypse but increasing work gigification and dehumanization;

How effective altruism, which is backed by Silicon Valley money and power, replaces relationality and accountability with cold mathematical notions of optimization;

Why the ridiculous idea of “AI sentience” is pulling attention away from expanding rights to all humans and nonhuman animals;

Why there's ultimately no responsible use of so-called AI and why it has no place in education where it atrophies critical thinking skills and damages the learning community;

How individuals can resist AI in their everyday lives by refusing chatbots, automated search, automated doctor scribes, airport facial screening - and collectively push back through labor activism and citizen resistance to data centers.

The Democrats have retaken control of the US House of Representatives as a “blue wave” of opposition to Donald Trump swept the party’s candidates to victory in congressional districts across the country.

A string of wins in Republican districts across North Carolina, Kentucky, Pennsylvania and New Jersey saw the party pass the 218 threshold needed to win a majority in the 435-member chamber, the minimum goal in achieving its aim of reining in Donald Trump’s presidential power.

The Democrat Troy Jackson has won Maine’s US Senate race, toppling five-term Republican incumbent Susan Collins in one of the biggest upsets of the 2026 midterms.

Jackson, 58, unseated Collins – who has been in the Senate since 1997 – in a closely fought, and often rancorous, race characterized by mutual accusations of corruption and clashes over living costs in the predominantly rural state.

The victory delivers Democrats one of their most coveted pickup opportunities this midterm cycle, and brings an end to Collins’ nearly three-decade tenure in Washington.