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Excerpt from www.bostonglobe.com

Last week, House Speaker Mike Johnson joined fellow GOP members of Congress to announce the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which would require those registering to vote in federal elections to show proof of US citizenship.

Never mind that for nearly 30 years, noncitizens have been explicitly banned from voting in federal elections.

Nor are Republicans entirely ignoring the lack of data to support their claims. “We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections. But it’s not been something that is easily provable. We don’t have that number,” Johnson said during the press conference. “This legislation will allow us to do exactly that — it will prevent that from happening. And if someone tries to do it, it will now be unlawful within the states.”

How convenient and unoriginal it is to use intuition to ignore facts. “The speaker said that this question is unanswerable and relied on his intuition, but in fact, the question is very answerable,” Eliza Sweren-Becker, a senior counsel in the Voting Rights & Elections Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said in an interview. “And it’s been answered many times, in that there is not a serious problem with noncitizen voting in the United States.”

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Excerpt from www.bnnbloomberg.ca

(Bloomberg) — Using Facebook in the lead-up to the US 2020 presidential election might have increased the chances of someone voting for Donald Trump, university researchers said in a study published Monday in the academic journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

As part of the study, the researchers asked nearly 19,900 Facebook and 15,600 Instagram users to stop using the platforms ahead of the 2020 election. The authors, led by Stanford University professors Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow, found some evidence suggesting that people who used Facebook might have been more likely to vote for Trump. They noted that their finding fell “just short” of being statistically significant.

“So we need to take it with a grain of salt,” Gentzkow said in a statement. “But if it’s real, it’s big enough that it could impact the outcome of a close election.”

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Excerpt from www.wsiltv.com

(CNN) — Rudy Giuliani was suspended from New York City radio station WABC and his talk show canceled after he flagrantly ignored orders not to discuss false 2020 election conspiracy theories, the station’s owner said Monday.

Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and Donald Trump lawyer who has hosted a daily talk show on the AM station for three years, was pulled from the airwaves Friday after he repeated bogus claims of vote rigging in the 2020 presidential election.

In recent months, Giuliani was repeatedly directed to not make claims of electronic voting manipulation surrounding the 2020 election, John Catsimatidis, the billionaire GOP donor and owner of the radio station, said in a statement.

Catsimatidis said the station received a letter in January 2021 from election technology company Dominion Voting Systems, which has been the target of baseless vote rigging claims by right-wing media figures, including Giuliani. WABC instructed its on-air hosts, including Giuliani, to avoid the subject, Catsimatidis said.

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Excerpt from www.aljazeera.com

Washington, DC – In a report released on Friday, the United States concluded that it is “reasonable to assess” that the weapons it provided to Israel during its war on Gaza have been used in violation of international humanitarian law.

However, the same report said that Israel’s assurances that it is not using US arms to commit abuses are “credible and reliable” — and that the US can therefore continue to provide those weapons.

Advocates say the apparent contradiction shows that the US is willing to go to extraordinary lengths to continue arming Israel, even at the expense of Washington’s own laws.

“What those inconsistencies show you is that the administration does know what is happening,” said Annie Shiel, the US advocacy director at the Center for Civilians in Conflict (CIVIC).

“They absolutely can see that there is devastating civilian harm, that there are apparent violations, that aid is being restricted. And they do not have the political will to do what that means — and end US support and US arms transfers to Israel.”

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Excerpt from www.msn.com

Trump branded ‘moron’ by Bruce Springsteen fans as he taunts star about crowd size at New Jersey rally  MSN

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Excerpt from www.latimes.com

A batch of new polls from the New York Times, Siena College and the Philadelphia Inquirer has very bad news for President Biden: He’s losing. Among registered voters, he’s significantly behind in five of the six battleground states that are most likely to decide the election. He does slightly better among likely voters but remains behind in five key states.

It’s a snapshot, but it’s consistent with the overall trend of this campaign — which is, again, he’s losing.

Biden and many of his supporters seem to think the solution is to get right with the issues — the economy, the Israel-Hamas war, student loans, pot legalization, the threat to democracy and so on. If he can just find the sweet spot on policy, they believe, voters will come home.

That might be true to some extent. But I think focusing on the issues misses Biden’s real weakness: vibes.

“Vibes” is just a trendy word for “mood” or “feelings.” Whatever you call them, the relationship between attitudes and issues is not always as rational as some think.