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Two-time failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton promoted the January 6 hearing Thursday amid media concerns that few will actually watch the primetime airing.

Just one great reason to watch todays January 6 hearing? Hillary asked. MAGA Republicans Desperately Dont Want You to.

Clinton was not the only celebrity to promote the hearing. Mark Hamill, who played Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, also promoted the hearing.

I am SO ready for accountability for the violent insurrection against our government & the coup incited by Drumpf & his minions, he said. Will YOU be watching the@January6thCmte? he asked.

The promotion of the hearing comes as many media outletshighly touted the event, which conveys a concern that the hearing will be mostly ignored amid 40-year-high inflation, record-breaking gas prices, and supply chain woes.

Politicoquestioned how successful the hearing will be. Will the Democrats succeed? Will they go too far? the publication asked before telling itsreaders that the hearing deserve[s] our advance scrutiny for the new ground they appear to be breaking.

USA Today praised establishment television outlets for airing the estimated 90-minute hearing but slammed Fox News for ignoring the partisan powwow. Where can you watch the proceedings? the outlet asked.

Anywhere but on Fox News, it answered. CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS and NBC will carry the initial hearing, which begins at 8 p.m. EDT.

On Thursday, Breitbart News reported aninternal Capitol Police report thatrevealed extensive security failures on House Speaker Nancy Pelosis (D-CA) watch on January 6.Dated June 4, the report shows sweeping mistakes from the department, which includedelayed mobilization ofspecialized civil disturbance units and the dismantling of anintelligence unit that tracked threats on social media.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

An August pollrevealedthat 58 percent of voters believe the January 6 Committee is biased toward Democrats. Only 45 percent of Americans find Trumpresponsiblefor the protest, a decline of 7 points since January 2021, according to an NBC News poll.

Follow Wendell Huseb onTwitterandGettr@WendellHuseb. He is the author ofPolitics of Slave Morality.

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Hillary Clinton Promotes January 6 Committee Primetime Hearing

Is something wrong with HillRod?

I suppose I should rephrase that question.

Of course a LOT is wrong with her.

But is something newly wrong?

Something wrong with her health?

Is she suddenly spiraling downhill?

New photos circulating online of Bill and Hill walking the beach are leading many to speculate something is definitely very wrong.

From the DailyMail:

Hes just celebrated his 75th birthday but it looks like the party is well and truly over for Bill Clinton.

Seen in these exclusive pictures obtained by DailyMail.com, the former president and wife Hillary, 73, looked more like glum and glummer than a couple enjoying the Hamptons sunshine when they went for a stroll on the beach earlier on Tuesday.

And perhaps its little wonder. Because, while the Clintons have long since enjoyed an annual getaway to the Hamptons town of Amagansett, there is no escaping the past.

Take a look for yourself:

My friends over at TheGatewayPundit speculated that perhaps something was giving her extreme photosensitivity:

Twice failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton wore a long sleeve shirt, baggy pants, sunglasses and a large hat.

Hillary was so desperate to shield every inch of her skin from the sun that she even pulled her sleeves over her hands.

What is wrong with Hillary Clinton?

Is she taking certain medications that cause photosensitivity?

According to the Daily Mail, Hillary Clinton got winded and had to take a break after walking 1/2 mile.

We dodged a bullet.

Heres what Im wondering.

Anyone remember this Q drop?

Seems fitting right now:

Or as WD says:

More:
Is Something Wrong With Hillary Clinton? - We Love Trump

Retired Marine Corps Gen. John Allen resigned Sunday as president of the Brookings Institution amid a federal investigation into allegations that he illegally lobbied the U.S. government on behalf of Qatar.

We want to thank John for his contributions to Brookings, including his leadership in successfully guiding the institution during the pandemic, as well as his many years of service and sacrifice for our country, the think tank said in a statement.

Mr. Allens resignation comes after Brookings placed him on leave last week.

According to The Associated Press, he is accused of making false statements and withholding incriminating documents about his role on behalf of Qatar while simultaneously pursuing at least one multimillion-dollar business deal with the Persian Gulf monarchy.

The investigation has already ensnared a former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates.

Richard G. Olson, a career Foreign Service officer, pleaded guilty to federal charges in connection with the secret lobbying campaign. He implicated Mr. Allen in the scheme, according to media reports and court documents.

Mr. Allen, a retired four-star general, was named president of the think tank in 2017 after having commanded U.S. and allied troops in Afghanistan. He also was a vocal supporter of Hillary Clinton in her campaign for the White House.

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John Allen, head of Brookings Institution think tank, resigns amid FBI investigation - Washington Times

Washington William Barr, President Donald Trump's former attorney general, toldthe House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 riotthat he advisedTrump there was no evidence of election fraud in Detroit.

During pre-recorded testimony aired Monday, Barr said that after the 2020 election, Trump "didn't seem to be listening" to him and members of his Cabinet who repeatedly told him there was no validity to his claims that the election had been stolen from him, including in Detroit.

On Dec. 1, 2020, Barr told the Associated Press there was no evidence of election fraud. Later that day, he was summoned to the White House for a meeting with Trump. He said "the president was as mad as I'veever seen him."

Trump raised "the big vote dump, as he called it, in Detroit," Barr said. "He said people saw boxes coming into the counting station at all hours of the morning' and so forth."

Barr said he explained to Trump that Detroit centralizeditscounting process at the TCF Center downtown convention hallrather than in each precinct. For the November 2020 general election, Michigan's largest citycounted its absentee ballots at the convention center under the supervision of stateBureau of Election Director Chris Thomas. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, most ballots cast were absentee.

"Theyre moved to counting stations," Barr said. "And so the normal process would involve boxes coming in at all different hours."

"I said, 'Did anyone point out to you ... that you did better in Detroit than you didlast time? Theres no indication of fraud in Detroit," Barr said he told Trump.

Trump's percentage of votes went from 3% to 5% in the Democratic stronghold, and the Republican former president received almost 5,000 more votes than in 2016, according to the city's official results.

"I told him the stuff that his people were shoveling out to the public were bullshit, that the claims of fraud were bullshit," Barr added.

The next day, Trump gave a speech reiterating unfounded claims of "a vote dump" in Detroit and elsewhere.

My opinion then and my opinion now is that the election was not stolen by fraud," Barr said. "And I havent seen anything since the election that changes my mind on that.

Barr resigned as attorney general on Dec. 14, shortly after the exchange.

Trump repeatedly questioned Michigan's election results in the wake of the 2020 election, falsely claiming that Detroit was the epicenter of"a lot of fraud."

Not only did Trump performbetter in Detroit in 2020 than he did four years earlier, but Joe Biden received nearly 1,000 votes fewer than Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016.

The statewide certified election results in 2020 showed Biden beat Trump 51-48%, or by more than 154,000 votes.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-California, also concluded the first portion of Monday's hearing by adding for the record the Michigan Senate Oversight Committee's 2021 report investigating claims of fraud in the state led by Sen. Ed McBroom, R-Vulcan.

The report found "no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud" and recommended thatDemocratic Attorney General Dana Nessel consider investigating individuals who pushed false claims "to raise money or publicity for their own ends."

Biden's margin of victory of 154,000 votes wasmore than 14 times the 10,704 votes Trump won Michigan by in 2016.

In Michigan alone, Biden's marginalso was more than the margin by which Trumpwon Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin combined in 2016.

Michigan also has election procedures in place to prevent widespread fraud, including bipartisan boards of canvassers that examine and confirm results in each county.

Each record produced during the ballot counting process is scrutinized and compared in public during the canvassing process, and the state uses paper ballots that can be used as a backup if there is a question about the electronic tally.

The Wayne County Board of Canvassers certified Detroit's electionresults after absenteeballot poll books at 70% of Detroit's 134 absentee counting boards were found to be out of balance without explanation.

There were similar or worse imbalances in Detroit in the August 2020 and November 2016 elections, and the same board with different canvassers certified the results. The office of then-Secretary of State Ruth Johnson, a Republican, found "no evidence of pervasive voter fraud" leading to those imbalances.

Michigan Elections Director Jonathan Brater said in an affidavit that there were 150 fewer ballots tabulated than there were names in poll books in Detroit.

"If ballots had been illegally counted, there would be substantially more, not slightly fewer, ballots tabulated than names in the poll books," he said.

rbeggin@detroitnews.com

Twitter: @rbeggin

Staff writer Craig Mauger contributed.

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Barr to Trump: 'There's no indication of fraud in Detroit' - Detroit News

DOLLARS FOR LIFEThe Anti-Abortion Movement and the Fall of the Republican EstablishmentBy Mary Ziegler318 pages. Yale University Press. $35.

The upheavals of the last few years have been so relentless that it can be hard to recall just how weird the partnership was: Donald J. Trump and social conservatives, an odd couple for the ages. As the legal historian Mary Ziegler writes in Dollars for Life, the start of the 2016 election cycle had evangelicals extremely worried. Hillary Clinton whose possible presidency they deemed catastrophic was running on what Ziegler calls arguably the most pro-choice platform in history. Could a foul-mouthed real estate mogul really turn out to be the savior they were looking for?

Sort of, says Ziegler, the author of several books about the history of abortion in the United States, though her argument in Dollars for Life mostly runs the other way that, over the course of decades, the anti-abortion movement laid the groundwork for an insurgent candidate like Trump.

Much of this was accomplished through the loosening of campaign finance restrictions, or changing how money worked in American political campaigns. While progressives have long argued that allowing more money to flow into politics empowers plutocrats to ignore the will of the people, Ziegler shows that its effects have been more ambiguous than that. Yes, she says, billionaires like Charles and David Koch worked assiduously to deregulate campaign finance, but big industry wasnt the only beneficiary; some members of the anti-abortion movement recognized early on that deregulation could help populist outsiders like them shatter the traditional G.O.P. hierarchy. Money moves in mysterious ways.

That traditional G.O.P. hierarchy wasnt always committed to the anti-abortion cause. Republicans of the late 1960s, Ziegler points out, were in fact more likely to favor repealing criminal abortion laws than Democrats were. Abortion itself was merely one issue and to the establishment, far from the most important in a broad right-wing agenda.

Even when Republican politicians tried to placate the restive anti-abortion wing of their party, they could count on campaign finance restrictions that favored the party machines, which in turn could crush any upstart competition. A Georgia delegate at the 1988 Republican National Convention described his socially conservative colleagues as the people who brought you the Spanish Inquisition and the Salem witch trial.

Dollars for Life begins in the years leading up to Roe v. Wade, which the power brokers of the Republican Party tried as much as they could to use to their advantage. On the one hand, the 1973 decision could bring a divided party together. Control of the Supreme Court motivated conservative voters who agreed on little else, Ziegler writes. But mainstream Republicans were also scared that Roe would be overturned. Roe, Ziegler says, was their shield. Without it, anti-abortion activists would demand that Republican politicians, inevitably preoccupied with the electoral odds, pursue a more radical agenda than American voters actually wanted. After George H.W. Bush lost in 1992 to Bill Clinton, who put abortion rights at the forefront of his platform, Republican leaders seemed to want the issue to go away.

But people like James Bopp Jr. werent about to let that happen. A central figure in Zieglers book, Bopp was 24 when Roe was decided, and has been a determined anti-abortion Republican ever since. He drew a direct connection between money and speech, noticing that even Republican control of the White House didnt translate into the kind of anti-abortion regime that he wanted to see.

He believed that limits on spending privileged big government at the expense of liberty, protected incumbents from grassroots movements and made it hard for advocacy organizations to function, Ziegler writes. More money, more influence. If establishment Republicans were getting skittish about abortion as an issue, thinking it was electorally safer to tack toward the center, Bopp decided that an influx of money raised by the anti-abortion movement would convince them otherwise.

You get the sense that Ziegler could recite this history backward and forward, comfortably parsing the arcane differences between 501(c)(4) and 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporations. She takes bits of levity where she can find them a hapless Republican populist done in by a pancake-flipping contest; an anti-abortion activist who thinks that she could help end abortion in America by making an autobiographical rom-com but Dollars for Life is an inevitably sober book.

Even if social conservatives like Bopp were initially turned off by Trumps antics, they soon realized that his weakness in the Republican Party might work in their favor. Isolated and unpopular, Trump was dependent on the anti-abortion movements support and ever attuned to his own self-preservation, he comported himself accordingly. He went beyond what would ordinarily be expected of a pro-life president, Ziegler writes.

Ziegler acknowledges a number of forces that contributed to Trumps ascent negative partisanship, for instance, and the proliferation of conservative media. But money, she points out, has played a key role in this new politics, with outside groups amassing formidable war chests to fund candidates who could be counted on to promote such groups interests rather than capitulate to the moderating pressures of the Republican machine. The rise of Trump and candidates like him, she asserts, is the story of the Republican establishments demise.

What looks like the imminent overturning of Roe has been decades in the making. And if the anti-abortion movement does get its way, a post-Roe world wont mean that the issue is simply turned back to the states. Ziegler shows that the movement turned to incrementalism strategically settling for pragmatic stopgaps only in pursuit of a much broader goal. Anything short of a nationwide abortion ban will not satisfy them, she writes. Dollars for Life recounts how the religious right learned a useful, if profane, lesson: You get what you pay for.

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Abortion Politics, Money and the Reshaping of the G.O.P. - The New York Times