Already, top party members are engaging. Vice President Kamala Harris plans to make an unexpected visit to Nashville to meet with the ousted lawmakers and push for gun reform, the Tennessean reported Friday.
And it’s unlikely the pair will be gone from the state Capitol building for long – local leaders are already moving to reappoint both of them well before a special election is held. The Nashville Metro Council on Monday will consider naming Jones to his old seat, which encompasses parts of Nashville. In Person’s Memphis district, the head of the Shelby County Commission, which has a Democratic supermajority, said she could consider reappointing Pearson.
“We are ready to go,” said Freddie O’Connell, a Nashville council member. O’Connell, a Democrat who is running for Nashville mayor, said he believes Jones has enough support from the council to return to the statehouse as soon as Monday evening.
Jones said on CNN Friday morning that he intends to get back to the statehouse. He sees his and Pearson’s roles as being a “voice of moral dissent” and a “speed bump to try and stop them from driving this train off the cliff.”
Following the reappointments, special elections will be held to permanently fill both seats. Jones and Pearson have already rebooted their old campaign websites and reopened their fundraising accounts. While it’s up to Republican Gov. Bill Lee to call for a new election and the state party to set deadlines, it’s likely the primary election will take place by late summer and the general election in the fall, ensuring that the pair will remain in the spotlight throughout much of the year.
“I do not expect Justin Jones to be suffering from a lack of resources to soundly defeat anybody else who might enter that contest as a Republican,” O’Connell said. Jones was uncontested in the general after winning the Democratic primary by about 300 votes.
State Sen. Ramumesh Akbari said Republicans’ pursuit of expulsions instead of considering gun legislation has ignited a spark among Tennesseeans, one that could backfire for the GOP.
“A week ago, no one outside this community knew Justin Jones and Justin Pearson,” Akbar said. “Now the world is watching. Their platform and their ability to advocate for the issues they believe in has been magnified.”
Several members of the Tennessee Democratic Party said donations have been pouring in since the Covenant School shooting and Republicans’ evictions of the so-called “Tennessee Three” who collectively represent the three largest cities in the state.
A GoFundMe account created this week to cover the Democrats’ legal expenses, should they choose to sue GOP leadership, has raised more than $38,000. The trio gained tens of thousands of Twitter followers in the hours following the controversial vote.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) tweeted that over $250,000 in donations poured into ActBlue, the fundraising platform used by many Democratic politicians and organizations, the day Jones and Pearson were expelled.
Advocates want to redirect the attention back to the issue they were standing for: changing Tennessee’s gun safety laws. Protestors have surrounded the Capitol building for weeks, calling for lawmakers to pass gun-safety measures like red flag and safe storage laws, as well as roll back recent moves, like enacting permitless carry.
“Since the shooting a lot of people here in Nashville, especially students and moms and educators, were all fed up,” said Zach Maaieh, a Students Demand Action leader at Vanderbilt University who has joined protestors at the Capitol. “We’re hearing about shooting after shooting. It’s heartbreaking every single time, but you don’t see anything happening from our state leaders.”
Gun safety advocates and lawmakers point to deep red states that have enacted red flag laws, measures that allow courts to temporarily confiscate guns from someone deemed dangerous
“Nineteen states – including Indiana and Florida – have already taken this step,” Everytown for Gun Safety President John Feinblatt said at a press conference Thursday. “Now it’s time for Tennessee to join that list.”
The state Democratic party is salivating over the public’s sudden interest in Tennessee politics and channeling that energy toward taking down Republicans. It’s an extremely ambitious goal. Democrats in Tennessee and throughout the South have been stomped by Republicans in recent elections, a phenomenon that Democrats blame on GOP-crafted gerrymandered districts and low voter turnout.
Dakota Galban, head of Davidson County Democrats, an area encompassing Nashville, said most of the emails and calls he’s received in recent days are from people concerned about what Republicans’ decision to oust the Democrats means for democracy.
“We’re really trying to get as many people involved in our organization so we can mobilize and organize volunteers and voters ahead of this special election,” Galban said. “Hopefully we can build on that momentum into 2024.”
Even former President Barack Obama weighed in on Twitter, calling the events “the latest example of a broader erosion of civility and democratic norms.”
“Silencing those who disagree with us is a sign of weakness, not strength, and it won’t lead to progress,” Obama said.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
When Rep. Dan Goldman launched the congressional bagel caucus shortly upon entering Congress, it was with the lofty goal of using food to bring comity to an institution severely lacking it.
But the New York Democrat wanted to show off too. Goldman’s district encompasses parts of lower Manhattan and Brooklyn and produces what he calls, “the best bagels in the world.” And what does one do with those culinary blessings other than flaunt them?
In early February, a member of his New York team drove down I-95 with 250 bagels and 25 pounds of cream cheese (plain, scallion, walnut, lox schmear and white fish salad) as well as lox from five shops in the district. At 7 a.m. the next morning, aides began what they called a “sophisticated slicing operation,” using two “bagel guillotines” to cut their inventory into halves. In all, an estimated 50 hours of staff time went into preparations at a cost of a “couple grand,” money which came from Goldman’s own wallet. Seeds were, by admission, everywhere. The scent of bagels was invasive. Demand was so intense — hundreds of hungry staffers and roughly 15 lawmakers showed up — that the halved bagels needed to be quartered. The office put out a press release lamenting “supply chain issues.”
The popularity of the event seemed like an affirmation of New York’s status as the ne plus ultra of the bagel. In reality, it said a lot about Washington too. For many years the bagel was just a hackneyed metaphor for the city’s power broker (crusty on the outside, doughy on the inside and lacking a fundamental core). The actual thing was unremarkable at best. Conservatives and liberals alike accepted the reality that to nosh on a decent bagel would require a trip well beyond the beltway.
No more. The bagel has emerged as the unofficial food of official Washington. It’s not just a matter of importing either. D.C. itself has become a burgeoning bagel hub. And it’s happened in quintessentially Washington fashion: through a combination of people entering the industry after burning out at prior jobs and a government flare for meetings and organization.
At the White House, chief of staff Jeff Zients, a former investor in one of D.C.’s new bagel powerhouses, Call Your Mother, has instituted bagel Wednesdays, rekindling the tradition he began earlier when he led Joe Biden’s Covid response team. An estimated 3,500 bagels were brought into the building between February 2021 through April 2022, according to an aide familiar with the coming and goings of the carbohydrate units.
They are dispensed with the type of managerial precision that has come to define a Zients’ operation: five separate boxes of a dozen bagels, each cut in half and accompanied by three spreads. Aides are known to scamper down to the parking lot in the wee hours of the morning when Zients arrives in his car with the loot, each there to bring a box back to its destined location: upper press, the chief of staff’s office, the National Economic Council office, the Domestic Policy Council office, and the Old Executive Office Building.
An even more extensive operation has been going on entirely in secret inside the Democratic National Committee. Since sometime in 2015 or 2016 (no precise origin date is recorded), the committee has had its own bagel Wednesdays. The organizers there have created an internal DNC slack channel — #Bagel-Wednesdays — with 33 members from the research and comms teams participating; a directory of all the bagel shops in the district, calendar reminders for the person whose week it is to bring in the bagels, and a D.C. bagel-specific column on Tweetdeck to monitor pertinent bagel news.
The DNC’s weekly ritual may resemble a bill-tracking app, but there is a feisty fraternalism to it too. A “controversy” erupted, one participant noted, when “someone went a little wild with the varieties.” Rohith Chari, the DNC research associate who is the committee’s official “bagel chair” said they’ve gotten so committed to the ritual that they conduct internal research surveys on bagel and cream cheese preferences, with the results placed into a spreadsheet and distributed to members.
The age of the bagel in D.C. — one can’t call it a “renaissance” since there was nothing of any delight to revive or reimagine — has been aided by the opening of a number of boutique shops that treat the creation and baking process with the seriousness it deserves. At least 21 specifically designated bagel stores now operate inside the district. Only four of them are named “Einstein.” That’s not counting the gourmet bakeries that are producing top notch bagels of their own, like Ellē and Bread Furst.
It has all come as a lovely surprise to those who have lived in the district and assumed they’d doomed themselves to life in a land of unfathomable bagel dullness. Now, even proud New Yorkers are expressing their shock at the impressiveness of the capital’s offerings.
A few weeks after Goldman’s staff drove down massive plastic bags stuffed with New York’s finest, I went to the lawmaker’s office on the Hill carrying four modest paper bags of D.C.’s own options. I wanted to know if Goldman, who had grown up in D.C. during the bagel’s dark age, could set aside his newfound New Yorker’s snobbery and fairly assess his hometown’s transformation.
Sitting around a small round table, he surveyed the products like a sommelier staring at a freshly poured glass of red wine. Between bites, he assessed the doughiness, and how it had to be apparent but not overwhelming. He motioned to a nearby toaster, noting that a warm bagel straight out of the baker’s oven made the contraption unnecessary. He looked over the tops and bottoms to assess whether there was a healthy enough covering of seeds. He described certain schmears as execrable.
“No offense to the people who like butter,” he explained, “but, you know, my children like butter. And at some point, they’re going to graduate and they’re going to realize cream cheese is actually the way you gotta do it.”
As we made our way through the sampling — seeds piling up between tins of cream cheese, paper plates, and a slab of pink, glistening lox between us — he talked about how the bagel, for Jews and others, could provide that rare sense of tradition and community. He revealed his go-to order (light cream cheese, a slice of tomato, some capers and a bit of salt) and conceded that, in recent years, he’d begun eating whole wheat, everything bagels out of the waistline concerns that accompany middle age.
And then, without a prompt for me, he made an admission that, for an up-and-coming New York Democrat, would have previously been so unthinkable, so downright radical, so utterly blasphemous that it may have sparked calls of censure and endangered his reelection campaign.
“I got to tell you,” Goldman said. “I’m impressed with D.C. bagels. It’s a lot better than I remembered growing up. I mean, it’s pretty good.”
‘It Was a Depressing Bagel Landscape’
D.C. has long been a breakfast meeting town without a good breakfast scene. Tacos were non-existent. Bodega egg sandwiches were few and far between. Au Bon Pain was the closest you’d come to a quaint little French bakery down the block. And the well-regarded bagel shops that did exist, like Bethesda Bagels and, for a time, Georgetown Bagelry, were largely connected to the Jewish communities in the suburbs.
Things began to change in the decade after the aughts (whatever that is called: the teens?). And it was Jeremiah Cohen, an upstart baker with culinary roots in the city, who is widely credited with changing it.
A D.C. native, Cohen, 56, is the founder of Bullfrog Bagels, an operation that started as a small batch project in his own home.
His fascination with the bagel dates back to his childhood, when he and his parents, who ran the Tabard Inn, would get in the family’s Volvo 240 on Sunday mornings and drive from River Park to Silver Spring to get bagels in the Maryland burb. It was a 45-minute commute, each way. But there were no better options closer by. It became a ritual that, in his words, “beat out any other breakfast experience.” Ultimately, it was one of the defining throughlines of this life.
When we talked, Cohen spoke of bagels as a source of fandom and regional pride; akin to rooting for the Yankees or the Orioles. D.C.’s absence from those debates — indeed, its status as the Bad News Bears of that analogy — gnawed at him.
When Cohen launched Bullfrog in 2015, there were a handful of good bakers in the city who made bagels, chief among them Mark Furstenberg of Bread Furst. But their client reach was predominantly in the city blocks around them. Bullfrog distributed to others before becoming a pop-up producer and then developing a brick-and-mortar footprint of its own. Months into its debut, it was labeled by Zagat as one of the “most promising independent bagel spots” in the entire country.
Cohen saw his craft as science and art, the bagel as a canvas as much as a collection of calories. It is, after all, both. There are specific ingredients (flour, water, salt, yeast, traces of milk or egg whites, malt syrup and other flavors) and cooking techniques (refrigeration, boiling, baking). But at each stage, the baker’s brushstrokes matter: the type of flour chosen, the flavor added, the size of the roll, the girth of it, the time in the refrigerator, the time left boiling, the water it’s boiled in, what kind of oven is used, the amount of seeds added and so on.
It’s amid those variables that a love of bagels can turn mere consumers into obsessives — where people argue about the ways in which the chemicals of the water alter the taste; where they engage in years-long utterly unresolvable disputes about the supremacy of one region’s offerings over another’s (We get it, New York. Calmez-vous, Montreal).
That’s the space where Cohen lives. He judges bagels by the sensory responses they elicit: from the chew (“You can’t make a bagel so chewy that it can cause fatigue in your jaw.”), to the elasticity of the pull, to the crispness (“It shouldn’t crumble. It should snap when you bite it. You can feel it but maybe not hear it.”). The beauty, for him, is in the simple notes. His favorite order is perhaps the simplest one: a bagel, lightly toasted with butter.
As Bullfrog grew, other startups joined it. Call Your Mother opened its flagship location in Park View in 2018, promising not just well-crafted bagels but outside-the-box options and jam-packed breakfast sandwiches. Zients, who was in the private sector at the time, had met with the shop’s co-founder, Andrew Dana, after being connected by a friend of Dana’s dad from their summer camp days. He not only invested in the start-up but took an active interest in the product, reportedly sitting down for taste tests.
Zients did not comment for this piece. However, the results speak to the quality of his palate. When Call Your Mother opened, lines snaked around the block. Eater named it one of the 16 best new restaurants in America.
The same year, Pearl’s came on the scene as a catering operation (its actual brick and mortar shop opened in 2020). Its founder, Oliver Cox, like Cohen, entered the industry out of a sense of nostalgia. He had enjoyed a career in journalism (he was Andrea Mitchell’s researcher for three years) and public relations. But like many professionals in D.C., he had only adopted the city as his home. He longed for the bagels of the strip malls in New Jersey, where he grew up. He wanted to import to the beltway the satisfaction he would get from biting into his go to order: an everything bagel, toasted, with pork or Taylor ham, eggs (fried with a runny yolk), American cheese, with salt, pepper and ketchup.
“When you’re hung over and 18, it’s perfect,” Cox told me. “And having it now, it brings you back. That’s what a bagel does. It brings you back.”
Being a bagel merchant is not easy. It is, as Ann Limpert, food critic for The Washingtonian told me, the type of business where “you can taste a shortcut.” Craft matters. It requires early mornings and long hours. It depends on foot traffic, office orders and catering gigs. It demands that people drop their paralyzing panic around carbs and indulge in something fundamentally unhealthy.
But Cohen, Cox and others, made it work. And they did so, in part, by leaning on the notion that D.C.’s dark days in the bagel diaspora were finally ending.
“A lot of people in D.C. who grew up in the tri-state area knew it was a void here,” said Cox. “And they were rooting for us.”
When Covid hit, the district’s bagel shops got a surprising boost. People wanted grab-and-go dining rather than indoor seating. They craved simplicity and a comfort food that matched the lack of pretension that now defined their lives. D.C.’s food scene — long infused by the influences of its foreign immigrants and perpetually underrated — suffered from the pandemic overall. But, in a small way, it also became more complete. The breakfast void was filling.
“I grew up here in D.C. in the `90s and `80s and it was a depressing bagel landscape,” Limpert said. “Right now, it’s having a very unique moment.”
‘We Were Fighting the Battle With White Bread’
There may be no greater authority on the bagel and its place in the D.C. food landscape than Joan Nathan.
A longtime Washington-based food critic, she is to Jewish culinary writing what Robert Frost is to poetry, having written the definitive works on the cuisine. In her seminal book, Jewish Cooking in America, she charted the path of the bagel from ancient Egypt through the 13th century Jewish communities in eastern Europe, who eventually brought the craft to America. In the late 19th century, newly emigrated bakers hawked their goods on New York City’s Lower East Side, displaying a dozen or so on long wooden sticks. But for decades, there was limited desire for bagels beyond the city’s reach.
Things changed in the 1950s and `60s, Nathan noted. The 1951 production of a Broadway comedy, “Bagels and Yox,” helped popularize the bagel. That same year, Family Circle magazine included a recipe for them. And then, not long after, the Lenders, a bagel-making family from New Haven, Connecticut, adopted a few changes to distribution that, in their words, helped “bagelize America.” The first was to put the bagels into polyethylene bags to sell to supermarkets. The second was to adopt freezing technology. Longevity was achieved. A massive new consumer pool was suddenly reachable.
“We were fighting the battle with white bread, which in my day was synonymous with American taste,” Marvin Lender told me. “We were committed to getting out of just the Jewish and eastern Europe clientele.”
But while bagels were no longer just an exotic Jewish food, the Lenders’ innovations had a secondary effect: Most consumers didn’t appreciate the distinction between the mass-produced item and one made in craft stores or by high-end bakers.
D.C. was stuck somewhere in the middle. A government town filled by people who hail from places with good bagels; its citizens were fully aware of how lamentable its own product was. But D.C. is also a place that is often slow to adapt culturally — the very transient nature of it making it hard for non-chain stores to take root.
Eventually, those stores did. And then, the political entities followed, helping further accelerate the bagel’s elevation. That it came in that sequence is no surprise. Politics always operates downstream from culture, frantically trying to catch up.
After word got out about Goldman’s first caucus meeting, Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-N.D.) approached him to insist that a flour mill in his state was the provider for a lot of bagel shops in Brooklyn. Armstrong wanted an invite to the next gathering. He got one. In early March, the group met again, this time with entry restricted to one lawmaker along with one aide. Afterwards, Goldman posted a photo of the event on Twitter, calling it a “bipartisan success.”
But there was something slightly off about the picture. The bagels, to the trained eye, didn’t appear like the New York variety. The congressman, it turned out, had tried to FedEx them from his district overnight. When they didn’t arrive the next day, there was panic and speculation that a hungry mailman had intercepted the package. But instead of calling off the event, an emergency order was placed to Call Your Mother. It was a quiet affirmation that the Washington bagel had truly arrived.
But no amount of lawmaker comity can obscure the fact that eating a bagel is fundamentally an act of culture not politics, which is why I wanted Nathan to put her stamp on D.C.’s product. When I first reached out to her in late February to tell her I was doing an article about the bagel’s final, thankful emergence, she not only agreed to talk but added a suggestion: Why not do a taste test? And so, on a winter Sunday morning, I picked up three bagels each from Bullfrog, Call Your Mother, and Bread Furst before stopping by her house.
From the start, Nathan made clear she had well-honed opinions on the matter. She did not like everything bagels, she explained, because the onion often overwhelmed the taste buds. She liked her bagel to be light. Her go-to is a bagel that’s fresh out of the oven (she likes a lot of seeds but no salt and would not be caught dead buying the supermarket variety), buttered (good butter, of course, not the mass-produced stuff) with lox.
We spent that morning eating and talking about how the bagel became entwined with Jewish culture and got a footprint in D.C. She credited the bakers, chief among them Furstenberg, whose bagel she liked the best of the three.
But she also spoke of something deeper at play.
The bagel is the ultimate communal food, an ideal fit for a town structured by tribes. Its consumers care about the product enough to create excel spreadsheets and additional slack channels for it. And the product, in turn, binds those consumers together, placing them all on the same, humbling level: hand reaching into the brown crumpled paper bag, pulling out a round piece of dough, cutting it with a floppy white plastic serrated knife, dipping that knife into the cream cheese, wondering fearfully if a colleague had dipped twice.
The bagel is customizable too; the rare food that provides a window into the nature and even upbringing of its consumer. For a city filled with alpha personalities, it’s an opportunity to show off one’s identity. For the transplants, it’s also something rarer and more important: a product for which one can grow sentimental.
Nathan recounted a meal she had roughly three years ago with one of the district’s most prominent media personalities (she insisted I not reveal his name). As she glanced across the table, she noticed the person was meticulously slicing cucumbers and placing them gently around the bagel’s circumference. After laying down the full circle, he stopped, and delicately placed a slice of tomato on top. It was only then — with every bite guaranteed to have equally proportioned ingredients — that he dove in.
“It was sort of endearing because you could see he’d been doing this since he was a kid,” Nathan said. “I thought to myself, this is his bagel.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Cairo: Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry held talks with his Yemeni counterpart Ahmed Awad Bin Mubarak in Cairo, calling for a comprehensive political solution in war-torn Yemen.
Shoukry said that Egypt encourages all efforts “aimed at finding a comprehensive and sustainable political solution in Yemen, to be agreed upon by the various Yemeni sects, in order to preserve the country’s unity,” said the Egyptian Foreign Ministry in a statement on Thursday.
The Egyptian Minister reiterated Egypt’s support for the legitimate government led by the Yemeni Presidential Leadership Council, and for the UN-sponsored truce between warring forces in Yemen, particularly those between the internationally recognised government and the Iran-backed Houthi militia.
For his part, Bin Mubarak affirmed Yemen’s appreciation for Egypt’s constant support of the Yemeni government and Cairo’s “efforts to reach a political settlement that would restore security and stability to the country”.
The Yemeni top diplomat briefed his Egyptian counterpart on the latest developments in Yemen and the ongoing efforts to reach a political solution in the country, Xinhua news agency reported.
Bin Mubarak handed Shoukry a letter from Chairman of the Yemeni Presidential Leadership Council Rashad Al-Alimi, addressed to Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi.
Since a truce came into effect in early April last year, Yemenis have witnessed nearly a year of reduced violence and the overall situation in Yemen has been relatively stable in the past months.
Yemen has been mired in a civil war since late 2014 when the Iran-backed Houthi militia stormed several northern cities and forced the Saudi-backed Yemeni government out of the capital of Sanaa. A Saudi-led military coalition intervened in the Yemeni conflict in 2015 to support the Yemeni government.
William Brennan, an attorney for McGrath’s wife, Laura Bruner, also confirmed the death and said she was “absolutely distraught.”
According to an email earlier from FBI Supervisory Special Agent Shayne Buchwald in Maryland, McGrath was wounded during “an agent-involved shooting” around 6:30 p.m. in a commercial area on the southwestern outskirts of Knoxville, Tennessee. Buchwald said McGrath was taken to a hospital.
Further details, including how McGrath was wounded and what led up to it, were not immediately released. The shooting was under investigation.
“The FBI takes all shooting incidents involving our agents or task force members seriously,” said Buchwald, who declined to confirm that McGrath had died.
McGrath, 53, served as chief of staff to former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan. He was declared a wanted fugitive after his disappearance, and the FBI has said he was considered an international flight risk.
In a statement, Hogan said he and his wife, Yumi, “are deeply saddened by this tragic situation. We are praying for Mr. McGrath’s family and loved ones.”
Murtha called the death “a tragic ending to the past three weeks of uncertainty” and said his client always maintained his innocence.
After McGrath failed to appear at Baltimore’s federal courthouse on March 13, Murtha said he believed McGrath, who had moved to Naples, Florida, was planning to fly to Maryland the night before. Instead of beginning jury selection, a judge issued an arrest warrant and dismissed prospective jurors.
McGrath was indicted in 2021 on accusations he fraudulently secured a $233,648 severance payment, equal to one year of salary as the head of Maryland Environmental Service, by falsely telling the agency’s board the governor had approved it. He was also accused of fraud and embezzlement connected to roughly $170,000 in expenses. McGrath pleaded not guilty.
McGrath resigned just 11 weeks into the job as Hogan’s chief of staff in 2020 after the payments became public.
If convicted of the federal charges, he would have faced a maximum sentence of 20 years for each of four counts of wire fraud, plus a maximum of 10 years for each of two counts of embezzling funds from an organization receiving more than $10,000 in federal benefits.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Chennai: AIADMK General Secretary K. Palaniswami on Monday said that only the BJP’s national leadership can decide on the alliance in the state for the Lok Sabha elections next year.
Interacting with media persons at Salem, the AIADMK leader’s comment came following state BJP leader K. Annamalai’s “interpretation” of Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s statement as it had “some nuances”. Even as Union Minister of state for Information and Broadcasting and BJP’s former state chief, L. Murugan has said that the alliance with the AIADMK would continue, Annamalai said that as of now the alliance was intact but elections for 2024 Lok Sabha are far off. He had also said that those who knew Hindi well can “interpret” Shah’s speech.
Palaniswami’s statement was a clear message to the state BJP leadership that he would be directly dealing with their national leadership and not with them. The central BJP leadership wants a few seats from Tamil Nadu in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections and does want the AIADMK as its alliance partner.
It is also clear that without an alliance with the AIADMK, the BJP will not get any seat in Tamil Nadu and the central leadership of the party cannot afford this.
Palaniswami, when asked on BJP leader Nainar Nagendran’s statement that he was invited to rejoin AIADMK by him, confirmed it, adding: “Not only Nainar Nagendran but all leaders who had quit the AIADMK party should rejoin it.”
“We’re not just passing out palm cards or endorsing, we are involved in the very embryonic stages of running a movement electoral contest that helps us build more people, ideas and energy into our quest for a truly just and equitable public education system in Chicago,” CTU President Stacy Davis Gates said in an interview.
“All of the things happening in our city, the violence, the unhoused crisis,” she said, “those are things that become intertwined with fully funded schools, smaller class sizes, a nurse and social worker in every building.”
The labor group wants to remake how the city government addresses housing, poverty and education, and it has built an independent political organization to push that mission. It has supported winning campaigns of progressive Democrats to the Chicago City Council, Illinois General Assembly and Congress — even though its picks for mayor in 2015 and 2019 lost to Rahm Emanuel and Lori Lightfoot.
In Brandon Johnson — a progressive county commissioner, former CTU organizer and teacher whose soaring oratory has been a hallmark of rallies and contract fights — the union’s critics see a takeover of the city’s politics.
“CTU already has outsized power compared to any other union or special interest group because unlike the police or the firefighters or transit workers, they have the right to strike,” said Forrest Claypool, a former Chicago schools chief who resigned from office amid a 2017 ethics scandal.
“They also have an outsized impact on working families who have no other choice on where to send their children,” said Claypool, who is supporting Johnson’s opponent, Paul Vallas. “That power, combined with a mayor who is essentially a wholly owned subsidiary, would make them a dangerous force.”
The union has proven to be a thorn for past mayors. Union work stoppages under Emanuel and Lightfoot in 2012, 2016, 2019 and 2022 infuriated city and corporate leaders who have sought to reform urban schools in ways favored by centrist Democrats.
But it also drew criticism over its refusal to return to in-person teaching during the pandemic as a protest for stricter district safety protocols that drew national attention — particularly after many suburban districts and private schools found ways to bring students back.
Now the union and its state and national affiliates have bankrolled Johnson’s campaign with millions of dollars, and committed up to $2 million more through a CTU plan to apportion a chunk of monthly member dues to union PACs. A roster of labor group members work or volunteer for Johnson’s campaign to advance the union’s formidable ground game.
Divisions over public safety and race were central campaign themes in the lead-up to Chicago’s nine-person Feb. 28 election that ousted Lightfoot, but the first round’s results only made things more complicated. By picking Vallas and Johnson, voters advanced two figures with divergent philosophies for the city that reflect a polarized electorate.
It also elevated deep divisions over education.
Although Vallas focused his campaign on public concerns about the city’s crime and Johnson’s history of supporting efforts to “defund” the police, whoever wins on Tuesday will have immense responsibility over a shrinking school district with troubled finances.
The election comes as Chicago schools, home to 322,000 students who are predominantly Black and Latino, stand to re-enter a period of financial turmoil that left officials relying on expensive borrowing to keep the lights on and make payroll not long ago.
The city is also decentralizing the power mayors once held over the Chicago Board of Education just as its latest contract with teachers expires in 2024. While the next mayor will still get to appoint a chief executive, they will begin to face members of a school board who are elected rather than appointed — a longtime CTU goal that marks an opening for the labor group to expand its influence.
A former Chicago Public Schools CEO, Vallas has won support from past school chiefs including Obama-era Education Secretary Arne Duncan, the city’s police union, many business leaders, the state’s charter school community, and a D.C.-based PAC affiliated with former Trump administration Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.
Test scores saw mixed results during Vallas’ Chicago tenure, though nearly 80 schools were opened, including charters, and Vallas helped land two collective bargaining agreements. Vallas even drew praise from then-President Bill Clinton.
But the district failed to contribute to teacher pension payments and instead used the money for other expenses, seeding financial problems that still loom over its balance sheet. Vallas also embarked on a system where staff and administrators at low-performing schools were fired and dozens of campuses were ultimately closed.
Vallas then left Chicago to oversee troubled school systems in Philadelphia, New Orleans and Haiti, where he similarly drew praise and criticism.
Vallas said that as mayor he would focus on visiting schools and going to union meetings — and negotiating directly with union officials, even after a contract is signed.
“We would regularly, monthly, talk about issues and to kind of head off grievances before they were filed,” he told POLITICO about his approach.
But overall, many prominent Democrats are split on the race.
Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who broke with Lightfoot to support teachers during the 2019 contract fight that culminated with an 11-day strike, rank among a list of progressives backing Johnson. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and former Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.) have endorsed Vallas.
To some influential labor figures, CTU’s trajectory is obvious.
“I would argue that the CTU has won already,” American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said in an interview.
“Before Brandon was a candidate, what I heard from journalists was that CTU was disconnected from the community and they didn’t have the support that they used to have,” Weingarten said. “If that was true, then Brandon would not have gotten as far as he’s gotten. CTU has a tremendous network, there’s tremendous engagement, and CTU clearly helped Brandon get to where he’s gotten.”
The possibility of Johnson as mayor has some education watchers concerned he would be controlled by the CTU and realign the mayor’s office to the union’s causes.
“I don’t recall anywhere in the country where a paid organizer, someone for any union group, now having the keys to the executive office,” said Chicago City Council member Tom Tunney, a Democrat who is backing Vallas. “I just really think there needs to be a balance of power there.”
Johnson dismisses concerns that he would have a difficult time managing his relationship with the CTU.
“I’m going to be the mayor for the city of Chicago for everyone. It’s how I got here. It’s about being collaborative,” he told attendees at a City Club of Chicago luncheon last week.
“As the mayor of the city of Chicago, everyone should get what they deserve,” Johnson said. “No one should lose at the expense of someone else winning. That is my philosophy. And that’s how I’m going to approach every negotiation.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
The letter was sent a day after Bragg’s office acknowledged that they had issued the first-ever indictment of a former president. Officials have also indicated they are working with Trump’s lawyers to negotiate his surrender. Though the timing of both his surrender and arraignment hasn’t been finalized, they are tentatively planned for Tuesday, according to a person familiar with the matter.
It’s uncharted territory for the legal system, the government and the country, which has never seen the indictment and prosecution of a former president. Though the precise evidence against Trump remains unknown, the case appears centered on hush money payments to a porn actress, Stormy Daniels, in 2016 to silence her allegations of a sexual relationship during Trump’s first presidential bid.
The indictment, which remains under seal, prompted a torrent of attacks from Trump’s allies, many of whom denounced it as a political witch hunt. While Trump himself has called for protests in the streets — and on Friday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) echoed that call — most House Republicans have instead vowed to train a microscope on the Democratic district attorney, requesting information and documents about the probe.
Bragg’s office used the letter to the lawmakers, a copy of which was obtained by POLITICO, to respond to those allegations of political bias.
“Like any other defendant, Mr. Trump is entitled to challenge these charges in court and avail himself of all processes and protections that New York State’s robust criminal procedure affords. What neither Mr. Trump nor Congress may do is interfere with the ordinary course of proceedings in New York State,” the letter reads.
State judge Juan Merchan is expected to preside over the arraignment and may ultimately be called upon to preside over the criminal proceedings, according to a person familiar with the process.
Bragg’s office also used the letter to plead with Capitol Hill Republicans to encourage calm, accusing them of engaging in “unlawful political interference” in the same breath.
“We urge you to refrain from these inflammatory accusations, withdraw your demand for information, and let the criminal justice process proceed without unlawful political interference,” Dubeck wrote in the letter to Judiciary, Oversight and Administration Chairs Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), James Comer (R-Ky.) and Bryan Steil (R-Wis.).
“As Committee Chairmen, you could use the stature of your office to denounce these attacks and urge respect for the fairness of our justice system and for the work of the impartial grand jury,” she continued. “Instead, you and many of your colleagues have chosen to collaborate with Mr. Trump’s efforts to vilify and denigrate the integrity of elected state prosecutors and trial judges and made unfounded allegations that the Office’s investigation, conducted via an independent grand jury of average citizens serving New York State, is politically motivated.”
Trump dialed up his rhetoric Friday, taking aim this time at Merchan, the judge he anticipates would be presiding over his case.
“The Judge ‘assigned’ to my Witch Hunt Case … HATES ME,” Trump posted on social media, complaining about Merchan’s handling of the separate proceedings brought by the district attorney’s office against the Trump Organization, which Trump said Merchan treated “viciously.”
Bragg’s office suggested that the House GOP inquiries appeared to be functioning more as interference for Trump than as legitimate congressional oversight, a concern Dubeck said was “heightened” by some of the committee members’ own statements about their goals.
She cited Greene’s statement that “Republicans in Congress MUST subpoena these communists and END this!” as well as Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s (R-Fla.) call to scrutinize lawmakers who are “being silent on what is currently happening to Trump.”
From a legal standpoint, individual lawmakers’ comments and motives aren’t typically given weight when a congressional committee takes actions. Trump routinely pointed to the comments of individual committee members’ plans to make use of his tax returns in his failed efforts to block Congress’ effort to obtain them.
Greene called for Trump supporters to gather Tuesday in New York, indicating she would be there herself. “We MUST protest the unconstitutional WITCH HUNT!” she tweeted. Her tweet was a departure from her reaction a day after Trump first suggested that he could be arrested, when she told reporters on the sidelines of the House GOP retreat that she would not be going to New York.
As of Friday, though, there were no indications of significant street protests or organized activities centered on the courthouse. Bragg arrived at around 7:30 a.m., amid signs of significantly heightened security, with little other movement aside from a large media presence.
In her letter, Dubeck also provided some details about the federal funding Bragg’s office has used in connection with Trump-related matters — money that House Republicans have suggested could now be under threat because of the indictment. Additionally, House Republicans received a second document on Friday detailing federal grant money the office has obtained.
None of that federal grant funding, she noted, has been used in the current investigation. She said the office has spent approximately $5,000 of federal funds — funds that the district attorney’s office helped recover during forfeiture actions — on expenses related to the investigation of Trump or the Trump organization.
“These expenses were incurred between October 2019 and August 2021,” Dubeck noted, adding that most were used to support Bragg’s predecessor’s successful defense of its probe of the Trump organization before the Supreme Court.
A spokesperson for Jordan didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the letter from Bragg’s office. Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y) said at an event on Friday that Republicans should “cease their intervention in an ongoing prosecution in a local prosecutor’s office.”
But House Republicans have already started laying some groundwork for a potential subpoena of the Manhattan district attorney, a move they haven’t publicly ruled out. They also appeared to make the case in their second letter to Bragg that they believe a subpoena would survive a legal challenge.
Comer, who noted that he hasn’t spoken with Trump recently, called the indictment a “political stunt” but said he needed more information before Republicans decided where to go next.
“I think before the next step we’ll have to see what, in fact, these charges were and then go from there,” Comer said in an interview on Friday.
Dubeck, in her letter, urged them to reach a “negotiated resolution … before taking the unprecedented and unconstitutional step of serving a subpoena on a district attorney for information related to an ongoing state criminal prosecution.”
Wesley Parnell contributed to this story.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Florida lawmakers approved the legislation just days after a school shooting in Nashville claimed the lives of three children, prompting emotional pleas from Democratic legislators who called the measure a step back after Florida enacted several gun restrictions in the immediate aftermath of the 2018 Parkland massacre where 17 people were killed.
“It’s shameful, it’s disrespectful to the Parkland families and every other Floridian who has lost a loved one to gun violence,” said state Sen. Lori Berman (D-West Palm Beach).
Florida joins a wave of other red states that have pushed ahead with new laws sought by gun rights supporters. Texas, Virginia, Ohio and a handful of other states have all sought to loosen gun restrictions and more than two dozen states have enacted laws similar to the one Florida approved Thursday.
Although DeSantis had signaled for months that he supports the legislation, supporters of gun rights have repeatedly called on GOP legislators to go further and allow people to in the state to carry guns openly. On Thursday, they criticized DeSantis for not going further.
“This bill is a half-measure and is not what gun owners were promised,” said Matt Collins, a gun rights supporter and former lobbyist for gun rights groups. “It isn’t true constitutional carry because it doesn’t include an open-carry provision. This bill is weak and failed leadership on part of Governor DeSantis and the Republican legislative leadership. Gun owners deserve better.”
Republicans in Florida have controlled the Legislature for more than 20 years and have gradually loosened gun restrictions. But right after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, they voted to raise the age requirement to purchase a rifle and enacted a “red flag” law that allows law enforcement officials to ask a judge to remove guns from someone who is a threat to themselves or others.
DeSantis — while campaigning for governor back in 2018 — said he would have not signed that Parkland measure into law. The Florida House has been moving a bill to roll back the age requirement to 18, which it what it was when Nikolas Cruz purchased the semi-automatic rifle he used at Parkland. GOP Senate President Kathleen Passidomo, however, has said she does not support lowering the age restriction.
DeSantis has said that was in favor of open carry, but Passidomo and some other Republican legislators were opposed to letting residents carry guns in public, citing the opposition of many Florida sheriffs.
Florida law currently makes it a felony if someone carries a concealed weapon without a permit. There are more than 2.64 million people with concealed weapon licenses who must go through training and a background check first. The new law — which takes effect on July 1 — does not end the permitting program but instead makes it optional. Bill supporters contend many Floridians will go through the permitting process because other state recognize the licenses.
The Senate voted 28-13 — with Miami Republican Sen. Ileana Garcia joining all 12 Democrats in opposition — to send the measure to DeSantis’ desk. The Florida House passed the legislation by a 76-32 vote last week.
Ahead of the vote, there was a polarizing debate that followed the same divide over guns that took place nationally after tragic mass shootings as both sides exchanged barbs over constitutional rights and whether ending the state’s permitting program would lead to an uptick in gun related deaths.
“This bill attempts to return the God given rights of humanity, the God given rights of self-defense,” said state Sen. Jonathan Martin (R-Fort Myers).
“I’ve looked all through the Bible,” retorted Sen. Bobby Powell. “There’s no scripture that talks about guns in the Bible. That God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten gun is not in there.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
New Delhi: Food safety regulator FSSAI on Thursday revised its order and allowed the use of regional names in printed labels of curd packets amid political controversy in Tamil Nadu.
Food Business Operators (FBOs) are now allowed to use the term ‘curd’ along with any other prevalent regional common name in brackets on the label. For example, ‘Curd (Dahi)’ or ‘Curd (Mosaru), ‘Curd (Zaamutdaud)’, ‘Curd (Thayir)’, ‘Curd (Perugu)’ can be used, the Food Safety Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) said in a statement.
The order has been revised following various representations received recently on the omission of the term ‘curd’ from the Standards of Fermented Milk Products and only the word ‘Dahi’ was mentioned.
The controversy erupted after the Tamil Nadu Cooperative Milk Producers Federation — which sells dairy products in brand name Aavin — declined to use the Hindi term ‘Dahi’ in its printed sachets as directed by FSSAI and said that it would only stick to the Tamil word ‘Thayir‘.
On Wednesday, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M K Stalin decried the move as an attempt to “impose Hindi”. Dairy Development Minister SM Nasar said the government had received a letter asking it to implement the directive before August.
“The unabashed insistence of #HindiImposition have come to the extent of directing us to label even a curd packet in Hindi, relegating Tamil & Kannada in our own states. Such brazen disregard to our mother tongues will make sure those responsible are banished from South forever,” Stalin said in a tweet.
BJP state unit chief K Annamalai has said the notification was not in tandem with the Centre’s policy of promoting regional languages.
Kolkata: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee sat overnight in front of Dalit icon Dr B R Ambedkar’s statue on Red Road in the heart of the metropolis, surrounded by a cohort of TMC leaders and workers under television camera arclights.
Banerjee, who is staging a two-day sit-in to protest alleged discrimination by the Centre against the state, had Wednesday in a change of stance urged all political parties in the country to unitedly fight the BJP in next year’s Lok Sabha election.
This is a departure from an earlier decision to remain equidistant from both the Congress and the right-wing party ruling India’s federal polity.
The Trinamool Congress supremo was accompanied by several party leaders, including Firhad Hakim and Aroop Biswas at the protest site.
Banerjee’s 30-hour demonstration is likely to end around 7 pm on Thursday.
Security measures in and around the venue were tightened keeping in mind the presence of high-profile leaders, a senior officer of Kolkata Police said.
Banerjee started the sit-in from Wednesday noon, protesting against the Centre’s “stoppage” of funds to the state for MGNREGA and other schemes of the housing and public works departments.
Stating that the 2024 Parliamentary polls will be a fight between the citizens of the country and the BJP, Banerjee had Wednesday asserted that people across religions must unite to defeat the saffron party and save the poor of the country.
She described the BJP as ‘Dushasana’ and ‘Duryodhana’ the two antagonists from the epic Mahabharata’.
“I urge every political party in India to unite to oust this Dushasana’ BJP government. This Duryodhana’ BJP should be removed from power to save the country’s common man as well as Indian democracy,” Banerjee said.
Kolkata has been witnessing a flurry of political activity ahead of the panchayat elections slated for this summer, which has now received a green signal from the Calcutta High Court.
The state’s political temperature has risen by a few notches with rallies by Banerjee’s nephew and TMC leader Abhisek, BJP’s Suvendu Adhikari and a march organised by the Left-Congress alliance, alongside the sit-in, which has been drawing large crowds of onlookers.
