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Abrams boosts voting rights cause in response to Trump

It took until the end of a long and winding rhetorical night, but some Americans did eventually hear a robust call for a federal expansion of voting rights during the primetime broadcast of the State of the Union.

The shout-out did not come from President Trump, who proposed nothing in his address Tuesday night that might fall under the category of "draining the swamp," but from Stacey Abrams, the loser of last year's race for Georgia governor who was tapped to deliver the official Democratic response.


After sketching the party's commitments to improving education and wages, combating gun violence, lowering health care costs, making immigration laws more inclusive, and confronting climate change, she declared that "none of these ambitions are possible without the bedrock guarantee of our right to vote."

She urged the country to "reject the cynicism that says allowing every eligible vote to be cast and counted is a power grab. Americans understand that these are the values our brave men and women in uniform and our veterans risk their lives to defend. The foundation of our moral leadership around the globe is free and fair elections, where voters pick their leaders – not where politicians pick their voters."

Her "power grab" line referred to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has adopted that term to characterize the election overhaul and voter registration expansion provisions in HR 1, the sweeping political process overhaul legislation pushed by House Democrats.

"Let's be clear: Voter suppression is real," Abrams said near the finish of her 10 minutes of remarks, by which point millions who had watched Trump had turned off their TVs. "From making it harder to register and stay on the rolls to moving and closing polling places to rejecting lawful ballots, we can no longer ignore these threats to democracy."

Her narrow loss in November to Georgia's top elections official, Republican Brian Kemp, amid Democratic charges of ballot malfeasance and voter suppression, has prompted her to start Fair Fight, a group advocating for expanded voting rights. She is also being recruited by D.C Democratic leaders to challenge GOP Sen. David Perdue next year, hoping her candidacy would energize fellow African-Americans and make Georgia competitive in the presidential race.

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Poll: 82% of Americans Want Redistricting Done by Independent Commission, Not Politicians

Capitol building, Washington, DC

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Poll: 82% of Americans Want Redistricting Done by Independent Commission, Not Politicians

There may be no greater indication that voters are not being listened to in the escalating redistricting war between the Republican and Democratic Parties than a new poll from NBC News that shows 8-in-10 Americans want the parties to stop.

It’s what they call an "80-20 issue," and yet neither party is standing up for the 80% as they prioritize control of Congress.

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Nationalization by Stealth: Trump’s New Industrial Playbook

The White House and money

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Nationalization by Stealth: Trump’s New Industrial Playbook

In the United States, where the free market has long been exalted as the supreme engine of prosperity, a peculiar irony is taking shape. On August 22, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced that the federal government had acquired a stake of just under 10% in Intel, instantly making itself the company’s largest shareholder. The stake - roughly 433 million shares, valued at about $8.9 billion, purchased at $20.47 each - was carved out of the Biden-era CHIPS Act subsidies and repackaged as equity. Formally, it is a passive, non-voting stake, with no board seat or governance rights. Yet symbolism matters: Washington now sits, however discreetly, in Intel’s shareholder register. Soon afterward, reports emerged that Samsung, South Korea’s industrial giant, had also been considered for similar treatment. What once would have been denounced as creeping socialism in Washington is now unfolding under Donald Trump, a president who boasts of his devotion to private enterprise but increasingly embraces tactics that blur the line between capitalism and state control.

The word “nationalization,” for decades associated with postwar Britain, Latin American populists, or Arab strongmen, is suddenly back in circulation - but this time applied to the citadel of capitalism itself. Trump justifies the intervention as a matter of national security and economic patriotism. Subsidies, he argues, are wasteful. Tariffs, in his view, are a stronger tool for forcing corporations to relocate factories to U.S. soil. Yet the CHIPS Act, that bipartisan legacy of the Biden years, remains in force and politically untouchable, funneling billions of dollars into domestic semiconductor projects. Rather than scrap it, Trump has chosen to alter the terms: companies that benefit from taxpayer largesse must now cede equity to the state. Intel, heavily reliant on those funds, has become the test case for this new model of American industrial policy.

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