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A new ad released by the Murphy campaign holds Ciattarellis claim this summer that the virus poses no risk to children alongside similar comments made by then-President Donald Trump, who lost New Jersey by more than 15 points last year. The 30-second spot echoes a series of advertisements released by California Democrats in the final weeks of the recall in both style and substance: black and red text, urgent phrasing and the looming presence of an unpopular former president.

On the debate stage last week, Murphy compared Ciattarellis positions granting leeway to parents and individuals when it comes to masks and vaccines as akin to supporting drunk driving it impacts both the person driving drunk and all the rest of us.

The Murphy teams renewed focus on Ciattarellis stances around Covid-19 comes even after a recent Monmouth University poll found a majority of voters assign some blame to the governor for failures that caused nursing home deaths to spiral in the early days of the pandemic. Even with New Jerseys leftward slant, Republican leaders had hoped a reassessment of Murphys pandemic response would steer voters into the GOP column in November.

But Covid-19s late summer resurgence scrambled those plans, forcing Ciattarelli a former state lawmaker to defend positions against public health policies that are largely reflective of the CDCs current guidance.

Ciattarelli has been condemned by public health experts, widely, for those types of positions. And we thought it was important to amplify that and that voters know the stakes, Murphy campaign spokesperson Jerrel Harvey said in an interview. We believe that this is a clear and present danger to our state.

The governors allies are also increasingly raising Ciattarellis appearance at an August school board meeting in coastal Toms River, where he encouraged parents to push the board to reject mask requirements at schools.

In the month since schools in Toms River reopened with a mask-optional policy, taking advantage of a loophole Murphys order made for districts to shed face covering requirements during extreme heat, more than 300 cases among students and staff have been reported and hundreds more are in quarantine.

A third grade teacher works with students in a New Jersey classroom. Ciattarellis opposition to school mask mandates complicates some of his more nuanced critiques of Murphys policies. | Seth Wenig/AP Photo

The district has defended its policy it only applied to buildings and classrooms that lacked air conditioning and was only in effect during a period when temperatures in town were at or above 75 degrees arguing many students were infected before the start of the school year.

Given the outbreaks at schools, Ciattarelli, a former member of General Assembly, backtracked on some of the comments regarding childrens risk of contracting Covid-19, telling the debate audience that if I had the chance to say it again, I would say it differently and more perfect.

Even so, Ciattarellis opposition to mask mandates, coupled with his earlier courting of anti-vaccine advocates, complicates some of his more nuanced critiques of Murphys policies.

There are still unresolved questions about how Murphys policies contributed to more than 8,500 Covid-19 deaths across long-term care facilities and state-run veterans homes the latter of which are the subject of state and federal investigations.

As Ciattarelli pointed out during the debate, Murphys vaccine-or-test order for school employees wont take effect until Oct. 18 weeks after the start of the school year. And while the governor has criticized Ciattarelli's positions as offering wiggle room to individuals who have been unwilling to get vaccinated, the Republican counters that Murphy providing unvaccinated workers the option to regularly test serves the same function.

The great fear here in New Jersey, especially since Governor Murphy said he wants to make New Jersey 'the California of the East Coast, is that a Phil Murphy not worried about reelection will only get more aggressive in handing down Trenton mandates that encroach on personal freedom and choice and, ultimately, push us towards another devastating economic lockdown, Ciattarelli spokesperson Stami Williams said in an email. As Governor, Jack will bring the legislature back into the decision-making process and chart a path that saves lives and livelihoods and protects our children.

For now, public polling suggests a majority of New Jerseyans favor Murphys top-down decision making when it comes to the pandemic.

The same Monmouth University poll in which New Jersey voters tagged Murphy on business closures and nursing home deaths found that the governor still has a broad base of support when it comes to Covid-19 prevention strategies, which include requiring students and teachers to mask up. More than half of those surveyed say the states pandemic strategy has been appropriate another 17 percent say it hasnt gone far enough.

Thats in keeping with whats been occurring at the national level. An Axios/Ipsos poll released in late August found that a majority of Americans favored masks in schools and vaccine requirements in the workplace. A Monmouth poll released last month showed national support for vaccine mandates among health care workers, teachers and federal employees and contractors.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks during a news conference at a school in San Francisco. The state announced this month the nation's first coronavirus vaccine mandate for schoolchildren. | Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

One of Newsoms top advisers told POLITICO in September that the main takeaway from Californias recall results was dont be timid on Covid. That was the turning point in this campaign, when Newsom came out and took bold action on vaccine mandates.

Murphys allies are hoping the same holds true in New Jersey.

The majority of people trust the science, New Jersey state Sen. Joseph Vitale (D-Middlesex) said in an interview. The outcome of the Newsom race illustrated that. Period. The same thing applies here. People don't think any differently about the coronavirus in New Jersey as they do in California."

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Republicans think voters hate Covid restrictions. This Democratic governor disagrees. - POLITICO

Republican and Democratic leaders in the United States Senate have reached an agreement on a short-term increase in the debt ceiling.

They are expected to approve it within the next two days, temporarily averting a possible financial catastrophe.

The measure would increase the federal governments borrowing authority by $480 billion, the amount the U.S. Treasury told Congress it would need to get to December 3, when the limit would expire.

Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) said he understands why leadership made the deal, but this is another missed opportunity to discuss how to better manage government spending, so that Congress doesnt have to continue lifting the ceiling.

This vote today, again, is just an extension of half $1 trillion in new debt ceiling authority without any debate of how do we manage that, how do we manage deficits, Lankford said in an interview on Thursday. We are trying to avoid a debt collapse, were trying to avoid not keeping up with our payments, I completely understand that but we continue to ignore the reason we even have this vote.

The rest is here:
Democrats, Republicans Agree To Short-Term Increase Of Nation's Debt Limit - News On 6

Late Wednesday night, there was finally the first snippet of good news this year in the never-ending abortion wars.U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman temporarily blocked Texas' near-total ban on abortions.The injunction was in response to a lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice against Texas.Attorney General Merrick Garland called the ban on all abortions two weeks after a missed period which are 9out of 10 cases "clearly unconstitutional."

Signed into law by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in May, Texas' abortion bansets up a bounty hunter systemthatallowsany random stranger to claim sovereignty over a woman's body and sue anyone who helped her abort a pregnancy. In his 113-page decision a searing and angrybreath of fresh air for those Americans who believe women are people Judge Pitmancalled the law an "unprecedented and aggressive scheme to deprive its citizens of a significant and well-established constitutional right."

Thisdecision wasn't just a rebuke to the misogynist Texas legislators who passed this law, but to the Supreme Court that upheld it.

Without hearing arguments, the highest court in the nation allowed Texas' ban to go into effect through an unsigned "shadow docket"decision short enough to be written on a postcard. So Pitman put in the work that the conservative majority on the Supreme Court wouldn't do. He listened to arguments, he examined the evidence, and he wrote a decision painstakingly explaining his reasoning. It turns out that banning abortion through the back door is not as easy as Republicans and the partisan hacks they installed on the Supreme Court thought it would be.

And yes, conservatives clearly thought they could quietly overturn Roe v. Wade without the public noticing.

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The entire Texas abortion ban was built on a cloak-and-daggers strategy. The law itself was an effort to get around the problem of the news coverage that flows from clinics and reproductive rights suing the state for passing abortion bans. The "shadow docket" move was more of the same, allowing the Supreme Court to overturn Roe without coming right out and saying that's what they did. As soon as the non-decision decision came down, the conservative propagandists fanned out, insisting that the Supreme Court ruling wasn't really a Roe overturnbut merely a "procedural ruling" that causes "no harm."

But as Pitman's decision demonstrates, that's a flat-out lie.

His ruling cites numerous examples of harm that the Supreme Court ignored in issuing its paragraph-length decision, including to "a Texas minor who had been raped by a family member" and had to drive eight hours for care, and "another woman from Texas who had been raped" and struggled "to take extra time off from work to make the trip to Oklahoma, as well as find childcare for her children."

In one sense, this nonsense about how this is merely a "procedural" decision as if people weren't going to noticethat 90% of abortions were banned in Texas worked. Every time I tune into a cable news show discussion about abortion and the courts, the discussion is over "if" the Supreme Court will overturn Roe in the "future," with little acknowledgment that they already did it through the back door. While the Supreme Court is hearing a more formal case in December Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health that will allow them to legalize abortion bans nationwide,the damage has already been done. And let's face it, even when they do issue a more extensive ruling, they're going to be deceptive about itand try to find some legal reasoning that allows abortion to be banned without coming right out and saying they're overturning Roe.

The reason conservatives want so much camouflage for their Roe overturn is not mysterious.Abortion rights are very popular, and there's a real chance thiscould hurt Republicans electorally. Sexism and still-lingering American puritanism may cause all sorts of chaos in polling people's moral judgments on abortion, but when people are asked point-blank about the right to get one, around three-quarterswant it to stay put. Even 40% of people who call themselves "pro-life" want the right to abortion, because even they know, on some level, that being against abortion is easy until you need one.

So really, it should be no surprise that approvalof the Supreme Court has plummeted to a new low of 40%, down from 58% a mere year ago. Even more detailed polling shows that skepticism of the court has dramatically increased, with more Americans agreeing that Congress should do something to reinthe court in or abolish it altogether.Somehow, however, conservatives seem to be shocked that their efforts to ban abortion under the cover of darkness have not gone unnoticed.

The conservative justices behind the shadow docket abortion ban, for instance, have becomeincredibly whiny in the face of all the completely earned accusations that they are sleazy fundamentalists who are too cowardly to own their rejection of law and custom in their frenzied efforts to turn the U.S. into Gilead. In the past month alone, Amy Coney Barrett gave a protest-too-much speech denying she and other conservative justices are "partisan hacks," Samuel Alito blamed the media and not his own actions for people disliking him, and Clarence Thomas accused peopleof wanting to destroy "our institutions because they don't give us what we want, when we want it," seemingly talking to a bunch of toddlers wanting candy, rather than citizens demanding basic human rights.

Even the Texas anti-choice activists behind this ban seem to be caught flat-footed. As Jill Filipovic writes in the Atlantic, "abortion opponents are claiming to be surprised that the law is being used as writtenand are perhaps realizing, belatedly, that their vigilante strategy comes with more than a few perils."

It appears that the people behind this law thought the mere threat of a lawsuit would cause abortion providers to shut down and that actual enforcement which would end up pitting the kind of repugnant people who would be abortion bounty hunters against sympathetic figures like doctors wouldn't be necessary. At first, that seemed likely, as clinics across the state shut down services and sent patients out of state for help. But then a San Antonio-based physician, Dr. Alan Braid, performed an abortion and wrote a Washington Post op-ed about it, daring anti-choicers to sue him. And sure enough, the situation turned into a circus, with two disbarred attorneys from out of state neither of whom actually oppose abortion rights suing Dr. Braid.

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John Seago, an anti-choice activist who helped pass this law, clearly recognizes the optics are bad here, whining to the New York Timesthat the lawsuits aren't "valid attempts to save innocent human lives" and instead are "self-serving legal stunts."

But here's the thing: There is no other way this law could be enforced but through repulsivepeoplefiling lawsuits. Despite all the self-flatteryabout being "pro-life," anti-choice activists are clearly motivated by misogyny, and don't care about "life."That's been demonstrated in a million ways, most recently in the embrace of anti-vaccine/pro-COVID-19 policies by Republicans. So anyone who would sue, declaring sovereignty over a woman's body and announcing his right to force childbirth on her, is going to be an unpleasant character. Seago knows this, I'm sure. He certainly sees the people who protest abortion clinics and how they don't generally do the best job of concealing how much hate and sexual resentment fuels their politics.

In a certain light, it makes a rough sense that conservatives thought they could get away with banning abortion through subterfuge. Americans have a long history of discomfort with the topic, and with talking about sex generally. Pro-choice activists are mostly women, making it easy for the right, in the past, to convincemost Americans that threats to abortion rights are being overblown by hysterical feminists. And while abortion is common in one sense 18% of pregnancies end in abortion, about 1 in 4 women will have one at some point it'snot something most people deal with on a daily basis. It's why the anti-choice movement has been so successful at gradually making abortion much harder to get without most people noticing. It's just not something most people think about until they or a loved one needs access.

But what conservatives are swiftly learning is Americans aren't the prudes and sexist they thought we were. Attitudes about sex are rapidly liberalizing. For instance, 73% of Americans are fine with sex outside of marriage now, up from 53% twenty years ago. (And those who disapprove are hypocrites, as 95% of Americans reported having had premarital sex in 2006, a number that's surely gone up since then.) And a majority of Americans agree that women have a long way to go to achieve equality, which is a good stand-in measure for whether or not people think sexism is wrong.

In light of these changes, it's not a surprise that people are both outraged about the Texas abortion ban and unafraid to say so publicly. The fight to end abortion rights is, politically at least, going to be much harder than Republicans were clearly betting it would be.

Read more here:
Republicans thought the Supreme Court could stealthily ban abortion. They were wrong - Salon

INDIANAPOLIS (Fort Wayne's NBC and AP) Republican lawmakers have given their final approval of their partys redrawing of Indianas congressional and legislative districts while brushing off objections that the new maps give them an excessive election advantage and dilute the influence of minority and urban voters.

The Indiana Senate voted 36-12 and the House 64-25 Friday with no Democratic support of the plan, advancing it to Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb for his signature.

Political analysts say the new maps that will be used through the 2030 elections protect the Republican dominance that has given them a 7-2 majority of Indianas U.S. House seats and commanding majorities in the state Legislature.

The maps divide Allen County into parts of four different state Senate districtssomething Democrats and some minority advocates, including the NAACP, have criticized as an effort to water down representation in one of the state's urban communities.

READ MORE: New GOP redistricting maps confusing, divisive says state, county Democrats

You kept the south side and the people of Fort Wayne from having a voice in this legislative body for things that they think are better for them, their families, their loved ones and thats not right, Democratic Sen. Greg Taylor of Indianapolis said.

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Republicans brush off critics, approve Indiana redistricting - Fort Wayne's NBC

A new poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation reveals that over half of Republicans (55 percent) believe immigrants and tourists are responsible for current pandemic conditions in the U.S., a much larger proportion than the 32 percent of Republicans who attribute high infection rates to the unvaccinated or to the 28 percent who cite the publics failure to wear masks or maintain social distancing. That pervasive belief that immigrants are to blame for Americas public health crisis suggests that classic scapegoating tactics have led to a dangerous mainstreaming of extremism.

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Classic scapegoating tactics have led to a dangerous mainstreaming of extremism.

There is no evidence that migrants are responsible for the surge in Covid-19 infections in the U.S. or even at the southern border. Across the U.S., Covid outbreaks have consistently been worse in regions and communities with no mask mandates or with low vaccination rates. The delta variant along with three other Covid-19 variants monitored by public health officials circulated in the United States before it was detected in Central America.

These facts havent stopped Republican leaders and conservative commentators from linking reports of migrants at the southern border to the spread of Covid-19. In March, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott accused the Biden administration of releasing immigrants in South Texas that have been exposing Texans to Covid. In August, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis claimed that no elected official is doing more to enable the transmission of Covid in America than Joe Biden with his open borders policies. That same month, former President Donald Trump issued a statement warning that thousands of Covid-positive migrants had passed through Texas without noting that migrants who test positive are quarantined.

Blaming immigrants for the spread of Covid-19 is a lazy but effective tactic that packs a double punch of disinformation. It falsely places the blame for Covids spread on immigrants rather than where it belongs: on a lack of adherence to evidence-based preventative practices such as vaccinations and masks. At the same time, it stokes resistance to perceived liberal immigration policies by focusing on the threat of disease, infestation and infection, by voicing dehumanizing ideas about purity and contamination and by suggesting that immigrants pose an existential threat to Americans.

This is a dangerous game that mainstreams and normalizes extremist ideas. Blaming immigrants for spreading contagious disease is a popular far-right extremist tactic that has been used for generations to both exploit and stoke xenophobic and nativist sentiments and has been used throughout the Covid-19 pandemic.

When such propaganda is spread not only on fringe internet platforms, but also by elected officials whom residents trust as the source of their facts and information, it becomes even more dangerous. Such hateful speech can also incite violence. People dont commit or condone violence against out-groups spontaneously, as Harvards Dangerous Speech project explains: They must first be taught to see other people as pests, vermin, aliens, or threats.

Blaming immigrants is a strategic frame that intertwines anti-elite, pro-nationalist and anti-immigrant discourse all at once. Liberal elites and their lenient immigration laws become the real bogeyman, and those laws must be countered with restrictive immigration policies that will protect people here from the dangerous and destructive force of immigration.

Such hateful speech can incite violence.

We should all be concerned about how anti-immigrant sentiment is being used to deflect attention away from ineffective state and regional public health policies, to discourage people from accepting the science about masks and vaccines and to encourage them to blame others for Covids spread. In linking immigration with the spread of Covid-19, Republicans seek to garner support for stricter immigration laws and persuade voters that the Biden administration is ineffective and dangerous to their health and safety.

But these tactics, which encourage the public to see immigrants as threatening, also lay the groundwork for extremist groups to advocate for violent solutions to address that threat as we have already seen in far-right terrorist attacks across the country and around the globe.

The Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was a clear illustration of the serious threat that propaganda and disinformation pose to our democracy. With a clear majority of Republicans now believing false claims about immigrants role in spreading Covid while simultaneously rejecting public health evidence that would reduce their chances of getting sick it is equally clear that the danger from propaganda is not just to our democracy itself, but to the health and well-being of the people living in it.

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Republicans blaming Covid on immigrants threatens public health and our democracy - MSNBC