Despite Persistent Warnings, Texas Rushed to Remove Millions From Medicaid. That Move Cost Eligible Residents Care.

Despite Persistent Warnings, Texas Rushed to Remove Millions From Medicaid. That Move Cost Eligible Residents Care.by Miranda Green, Floodlight, Jennifer Smith Richards, ProPublica, and Priyanjana Bengani, Tow Center for Digital Journalism, and photography by Sarahbeth Maney, ProPublica ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week. This story was co-published with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism and Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action. Word tends to spread fast in rural Knox County, Ohio. But misinformation has spread faster. The first article in the Mount Vernon News last fall about a planned solar farm simply noted that residents were “expressing their concern.” But soon the county’s only newspaper was packed with stories about solar energy that almost uniformly criticized the project and quoted its opponents.

German leaders settle on Feb. 23 snap election

 November 12, 2024 11:15 am CET

By Nette Nöstlinger and Rixa Fürsen

BERLIN — The leaders of Germany’s major parties have agreed to hold a federal election on Sunday, Feb. 23, 2025, following the collapse of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s troubled three-party coalition last week.

Scholz is now expected to hold a vote of confidence on Dec. 16 paving the way for the February election. For days, there has been speculation and debate on the timing of the vote.

“Now we can finally move away from this tiresome discussion about the election date and concentrate on what is really good for our country,” said Rolf Mützenich, the leader of the Social Democratic Party’s (SPD) parliamentary faction on Tuesday. “I believe this will help us to finally focus on the clear question: Who is the better chancellor for Germany?”

Whatever the outcome of the U.S. election, fascism will not fade away

“Fascism is might over right, conspiracy over reality, fiction over fact, pain over law, blood over love, doom over hope.” — Timothy Synder The underwhelming Democratic candidate Kamala Harris recently painted Donald Trump as a fascist. Not to be outdone, the demagogue and convicted felon called Harris a fascist, a communist and stupid. Trump added that he was “the opposite of a Nazi.” Yet two top U.S. generals who worked with President Trump begged to differ. They described the New Yorker as clearly an authoritarian fellow with a short attention span and no appreciation for truth: a “fascist to the core,” said one. Meanwhile, conservative commentators have begun to taunt their liberal friends about the fascist label. Have they got their passports in order? mocked one. If fascism has truly arrived in the United States, argued another, then why haven’t you packed your bags or joined the resistance? What these Trump apologists have forgotten (and that’s easy to do in this ahistorical time) is that fascism overwhelmed Germany so abruptly in 1933 that few writers, cartoonists and artists had time to leave. Hardly any could appreciate the danger, let alone the fragility of democracy. The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, who fled Hitler’s regime, later observed that “most people were not prepared theoretically or practically” for fascism. “Only a few had been aware of the rumbling of the volcano preceding the outbreak.” Nor did the regime tolerate much resistance. In fact, the majority submitted in advance.

NY Prosecutor SHOCKS Trump

Before Trump can pass his unconstitutional and MAGA policies and executive orders, he will have to go through NY Attorney General Leticia James first, who has beaten him over 50x in prior cases against his first term, and won a $450 million dollar fraud judgment against him in 2024. Popok is @ The Intersection about there being no finer battlefield "Attorney General" than Tish James who has the playbook on how to beat Trump and his policies at his own game, and where at a press conference in NY just after the election, she basically called out Trump and told him to "bring it on."

A Second World War mystery - Sherman Peabody

A Second World War mystery solved: 75 years later, a transatlantic team retraces two lost Canadians’ final days In 1944, a Canadian pilot and his navigator were shot down in their Lancaster bomber over occupied France – but their bodies were never found. Where did they go, and why did they never make it home? It took their family, amateur historians and students on two continents to finally figure that out. Read More

Gaiters win Loney Bowl; Become AUS Champions

LENNOXVILLE, Que. – Xavier Gervais' (Ottawa, ON/Cégep de l'Outaouais) 25-yard field goal in triple overtime sent Coulter Field into a frenzy as the Bishop's Gaiters topped the Saint Mary's Huskies 25-22 in triple overtime to win the 2024 AUS Loney Bowl presented by Bell. The fireworks came even earlier as seemingly down and out with 16 seconds left and down by three Gabriel Royer (Lawrenceville, QC/Cégep de Sherbrooke) forced a Saint Mary's fumble that led to a Gervais game-tying field goal with six seconds left to force OT. The Royer magic came after the Gaiters were in field goal range to tie the game but had a fumble themselves and gave Saint Mary's the ball and what appeared to be the game and title with 48 seconds left and no timeouts left. The Huskies ran the ball, and Royer, the 2022 AUS Defensive Player of the Year forced the ball loose. Kyle Chorney (Winnipeg, MB) pounced on it to give the Gaiters life and a movie script ending. Gervais calmly booted through a 16-yard field goal to tie the game. In overtime SMU had the ball first and Adam Johnston connected on a 38-yard field goal his fourth of five made on the day. Bishop's responded with a Gervais 17-yard connection. The teams also exchanged field goals in double overtime. As the third extra stanza started, the Huskies offense was stopped on first down. Royer again made a defensive play with a tackle for a loss of two yards. An incompletion later and the Huskies lined up for a 44-yard field goal attempt that sailed wide left. Bishop's took over and David Chaloux (Saint-Charles-Boromée, QC/Cégep de Lanaudière) immediately broke an 18-yard run. Two plays later Gervais sent the Gaiters into the history books. His 25-yard field goal gave Bishop's their first AUS title after moving to the conference in 2017. It's their first title of any kind since 1994 when they won the OQIFC's Dunsmore Cup. Chaloux was named game MVP and hoisted the Don Loney Memorial Trophy. He finished with 20 carries for 160 yards and an impressive 57-yard touchdown run. Gervais finished 6-for-6 on field goals. The game was marred by mistakes as Bishop's fumbled four times, turning the ball over each time. They were also 0-for-3 on third down gambles but still found a way to win. Saint Mary's also struggled on the frigid Lennoxville Saturday. They threw three interceptions, fumbled once and were stopped on a third down attempt. Bishop's outgained the Huskies 440 to 235 and had the ball for 5:36 seconds longer than the visitors. AUS Defensive Player of the Year Alex MacDonald (Eastern Passage, NS/Auburn Drive High School) led the way for the Bishop's defense with 8.5 tackles including 1.5 for a loss. He also had a pass breakup and an interception. Royer had eight tackles, half a sack and the massive forced fumble. For Saint Mary's quarterback Allan Young went 11-29 for 101 yards and three interceptions. He added the Huskies lone touchdown with his legs. His favourite target was Trydell Mintis who caught eight of those passes including a wild double deflection to set up the Saint Mary's touchdown at the 9:14 mark of the fourth quarter to give SMU the lead. Saturday's Loney Bowl was the third AUS Championship to go into extra time and first since 2017. It was the first to go three extra periods. The Gaiters win sends them to their fourth ever National semifinal with the last coming in 1994. They also participated in 1990, 1988 and 1986. Bishop's will face the OUA Champion Wilfrid Laurier Golden Hawks in the Uteck Bowl on Saturday, Nov. 16. Kickoff is slated for 12 p.m. Tickets for the contest go on sale on Sunday at noon at www.gaiters.ca/tickets. Follow the Gaiters on Instagram @GaitersFB and @BishopsGaiters and stay up to date with everything at www.gaiters.ca.

Trump Says He’ll Fight for Working-Class Americans. His First Presidency Suggests He Won’t.

Trump Says He’ll Fight for Working-Class Americans. His First Presidency Suggests He Won’t.

by Eli Hager

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

When Donald Trump was president, he repeatedly tried to raise the rent on at least 4 million of the poorest people in this country, many of them elderly or disabled. He proposed to cut the federal disability benefits of a quarter-million low-income children, on the grounds that someone else in their family was already receiving benefits. He attempted to put in place a requirement that poor parents cooperate with child support enforcement, including by having single mothers disclose their sexual histories, before they and their children could receive food assistance.

He tried to enact a rule allowing employers to pocket workers’ tips. And he did enact a rule denying overtime pay to millions of low-wage workers if they made more than $35,568 a year.

Trump and his vice presidential pick JD Vance have been running a campaign that they say puts the working class first, vowing to protect everyday Americans from an influx of immigrant labor, to return manufacturing jobs to the U.S., to support rural areas and families with children and, generally, to stick it to the elites.

Critics reply by citing Project 2025, a potential blueprint for a second Trump presidency that proposes deep cuts to the social safety net for lower-income families alongside more large tax breaks for the wealthy. But Trump, despite his clear ties to its authors, has said that Project 2025 doesn’t represent him.

Still, his views on working-class and poor people can be found in specific actions that he tried to take when, as president, he had the power to make public policy.

ProPublica reviewed Trump’s proposed budgets from 2018 to 2021, as well as regulations that he attempted to enact or revise via his cabinet agencies, including the departments of Labor, Housing and Urban Development, and Health and Human Services, and also quasi-independent agencies like the National Labor Relations Board and the Social Security Administration.

We found that while Trump was in the White House, he advanced an agenda across his administration that was designed to cut health care, food and housing programs and labor protections for poor and working-class Americans.

“Trump proposed significantly deeper cuts to programs for low- and modest-income people than any other president ever has, including Reagan, by far,” said Robert Greenstein, a longtime federal poverty policy expert who recently published a paper for the Brookings Institution on Trump’s first-term budgets.

Trump was stymied in reaching many of these goals largely because he was inefficient about pursuing them until the second half of his term. According to reporters covering him at the time, he’d been unprepared to win the presidency in 2016, let alone to fill key positions and develop a legislative and regulatory strategy on poverty issues.

He did have control of both the House and Senate during his first two years in office, but he used his only shots at budget reconciliation (annual budget bills that can’t be filibustered by the opposing party) to cut taxes for the rich and to try to repeal Obamacare. By 2019, there wasn’t much time left for his cabinet agencies to develop new regulations, get them through the long federal rulemaking process and deal with any legal challenges.

Trump and his allies appear focused on not repeating such mistakes should he win the White House again. Republican leaders in Congress have said that this time, if they retake majorities in both chambers, they’ll use their reconciliation bills to combine renewed tax cuts with aggressive cuts to social spending. Meanwhile, Trump would likely put forward new regulations earlier in his term, in part so that legal challenges to them get a chance to be heard before a Supreme Court with a solid conservative majority he created.

If he relies on his first-term proposals, that would mean:

• Cutting the Children’s Health Insurance Program, known as CHIP, by billions of dollars.
• Rescinding nearly a million kids’ eligibility for free school lunches.
• Freezing Pell grants for lower-income college students so that they’re not adjusted for inflation.
• Overhauling and substantially cutting the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, colloquially known as food stamps, in part by defining people with assets exceeding $2,250 as not being poor enough to receive aid and reducing the minimum monthly food stamp amount from $23 to zero.
• Eliminating multiple programs designed to increase the supply of and investment in affordable housing in lower-income communities.
• Eliminating a program that helps poor families heat their homes and be prepared for power outages and other energy crises.
• Shrinking Job Corps and cutting funding for work-training programs — which help people get off of government assistance — nearly in half.
• Restricting the collective bargaining rights of unions, through which workers fight for better wages and working conditions.

Trump also never gave up on his goal of dismantling the Affordable Care Act, which disproportionately serves lower-income Americans. He cut in half the open-enrollment windows during which people can sign up for health insurance under the ACA, and he cut over 80% of the funding for efforts to help lower-income people and others navigate the system. This especially affected those with special needs or who have limited access to or comfort with the internet.

As a result of these and other changes, the number of uninsured people in the U.S. increased in 2017 for the first time since the law was enacted, then increased again in 2018 and in 2019. By that year, 2.3 million fewer Americans had health insurance than when Trump came into power, including 700,000 fewer children.

President Joe Biden has reversed many of these changes. But Trump could reverse them back, especially if he has majorities in Congress.

Perhaps the main thing that Trump did with his administrative power during his first term — that he openly wants to do more of — is reduce the civil service, meaning the nonpolitical federal employees whom he collectively calls “the Deep State.”

This, too, would have a disproportionately negative impact on programs serving poor and working Americans. Agencies like the Social Security Administration and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which provide disability and survivor benefits and housing assistance to lower-income families in times of need, rely heavily on midlevel staff in Washington, D.C., and local offices to process claims and get help to people.

Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt did not respond to a detailed list of questions from ProPublica about whether Trump wants to distance himself from his first-term record on issues affecting working-class people or whether his second-term agenda would be different.

Instead, she focused on Social Security and Medicare, saying that Trump protected those programs in his first term and would do so again. “By unleashing American energy, slashing job-killing regulations, and adopting pro-growth America First tax and trade policies, President Trump will quickly rebuild the greatest economy in history,” Leavitt said.

One new ostensibly pro-worker policy that Trump, as well as his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, have proposed: ending taxes on tips.

Trump officials and Republican politicians have long said that more federal spending on safety net programs is not the solution to poverty and that poor people need to be less dependent on government aid and exercise more personal responsibility.

And working-class voters — especially white men without a college degree who feel that their economic standing has diminished relative to other demographic groups — have joined the Trump movement in increasing numbers. What’s more, some counties that have seen large upticks in food stamp usage in recent years continue to vote for him, despite his attempts to shrink that program and others that people in these places rely on. (All that said, Trump’s supporters are better off on average than the media often portrays them to be.)

Meanwhile, pandemic relief, including stimulus checks, did start during the Trump administration and helped reduce poverty rates. But those efforts were temporary responses to a crisis and were mostly proposed by Democrats in Congress; they were hardly part of Trump’s governing agenda.

Amid a presidential race that has at times focused on forgotten, high-poverty communities — with Vance repeatedly touting his Appalachian-adjacent roots — it is surprising that journalists haven’t applied more scrutiny to Trump’s first-term budgets and proposals on these issues, said Greenstein, the poverty policy expert.

Would Trump, given a second term, continue the Biden administration’s efforts to make sure that the IRS isn’t disproportionately auditing the taxes of poor people? Would he defend Biden’s reforms to welfare, aimed at making sure that states actually use welfare money to help lower-income families?

Trump hasn’t faced many of these questions on the campaign trail or in debates or interviews, as the candidates and reporters covering them tend to focus more on the middle class.

Interactive City Guide AI

interactive city guide Interactive city guides

can be incredibly helpful when planning a trip or exploring a new city! They offer features like searching for restaurants, hotels, historical sites, and activities with just a few clicks. Some popular options include: Toronto Interactive City Guide: Available in multiple languages, this guide offers preset searches for various categories like restaurants, hotels, and historical sites. Montreal Interactive City Guide: Similar to the Toronto guide, it provides preset searches and is also available in multiple languages. Visit A City: This platform allows you to create a personalized travel guide with itineraries, activities, and maps. Do you have a specific city in mind that you're interested in exploring?

WordPress’s CEO is spooking the internet

Why WordPress’s CEO is spooking the internet Over the last month, internal drama at WordPress has spilled into the public, causing confusion and concern among developers. ByCassandra Cassidy October 19, 2024 • 4 min read The company that invented blogging is on the verge of self-destruction. Over the last month, internal drama at WordPress has spilled into the public domain, causing chaos for a large portion of the internet that relies on its open-source technology. WordPress is a content management system that allows people with no coding experience to run a website. It's immensely popular, hosting 43% of all websites in the world, including the ones from NASA, the White House, and Harvard University. It’s often held up as a shining example of the internet’s OG promise to democratize information by allowing developers to collaborate, study, use, and distribute software with full transparency. It’s also experiencing a total meltdown stemming from a power struggle between its founder and its largest competitor, a feud that has the potential to damage—or at least meaningfully alter—the infrastructure of the internet.

NYT FINALLY Calls Trump UNFIT in BRUTAL TAKEDOWN

The New York Times ’s editorial board has issued a strongly-worded denunciation of Donald Trump as the presidential election looms, telling readers the Republican nominee “is unfit…

McConnell defends calling Trump ‘despicable human being,' throws Vance under the bus

McConnell defends calling Trump ‘despicable human being,' throws Vance under the busAccording to a new book, Mitch McConnell called Trump a "despicable human being," "stupid" and "ill-tempered” after the 2020 election. When asked about these comments today, McConnell effectively threw JD Vance under the bus.

The New York Times’s issued denunciation of Donald Trump as “is unfit to lead”

The New York Times’s editorial board has issued a strongly-worded denunciation of Donald Trumpas the presidential election looms, telling readers the Republican nominee “is unfit to lead” and a serial liar whose policies are “cruel” and will only “wreak havoc” on the nation. Without explicitly endorsing his Democratic rival Kamala Harris in the piece, the board wrote a searing 112-word op-ed warning of a possible Trump second term. “You already know Donald Trump. He is unfit to lead. Watch him. Listen to those who know him best,” it reads. Read More

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Please Advise! Is the Bad Man Going to Win?

Please Advise! Is the Bad Man Going to Win? Dear Yank, The Tyee is supported by readers like you Join us and grow independent media in Canada Anyone who isn’t in a nervous sweat right now is either comatose, chuckle-headed, sinister or just working on a really, really difficult jigsaw puzzle. Canadians are especially worried. At least Americans get a vote. We are like hostages locked in the trunk of a car driven by a drunken badger. The campaign’s home stretch has been shocking. Donald Trump is trying his damnedest to lose the election. The question is, will Americans let him? Trump’s entire campaign has been a remake of The Producers, that Mel Brooks film/musical about a stage show designed to be a commercial disaster that somehow fails to fail. Trump has piled up gaffes and outrages faster than a rat can procreate. He’s like a serial killer who has figured out that if you just keep murdering people, the cops won’t be able to keep up. Voltaire once said, “God is a comedian playing for an audience that is too afraid to laugh.” The same, we have lately discovered, is true of the devil. You want to snicker, but it’s all too frightening. Trump said his Madison Square Garden rally, where Puerto Rico was described as an island of floating garbage, was “a lovefest.” In Green Bay, he said, “I want to protect the women of our country.... I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not.” The man who recently rambled on about golfer Arnold Palmer’s tremendous penis, the candidate favoured by a majority of American evangelicals, followed up this weekend by simulating fellatio on a microphone. He also told Tucker Carlson that Liz Cheney should have “guns trained on her face.” (Carlson made his own news this week when it emerged that he once claimed he was attacked and clawed by a demon. Well, OK. But shouldn’t we hear the demon’s side first?)

A Soldier's Journey

'A Soldier's Journey' The long-awaited centerpiece of the National World War I Memorial was unveiled Friday, a 25-ton, nearly 60-foot-long relief capturing the human toll of the war. Located just east of the White House in Pershing Park, the relief panel is the largest freestanding bronze sculpture in the Western Hemisphere. The piece depicts more than three dozen figures used to tell the story of a single soldier, or "doughboy"—from leaving America for the war, witnessing death and destruction, and returning home. The sculptor, Sabin Howard, described the piece as emphasizing the process of being human as seen through the lens of war. Watch an interview with Howard and others discussing its creation here. Roughly 118,000 Americans died in the war, with more than 200,000 soldiers wounded (the global death toll is estimated to be as high as 22 million). Read about the decadelong effort to make the larger National World War I Memorial a reality.

JD Vance Campaign Event With Christian Right Leaders May Have Violated Tax and Election Laws, Experts Say

JD Vance Campaign Event With Christian Right Leaders May Have Violated Tax and Election Laws, Experts Say

by Andy Kroll, ProPublica; Phoebe Petrovic, Wisconsin Watch; and Nick Surgey, Documented

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance’s appearance at a far-right Christian revival tour last month may have broken tax and election laws, experts say.

On Sept. 28, Vance held an official campaign event in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, in partnership with the Courage Tour, a series of swing-state rallies hosted by a pro-Trump Christian influencer that combine prayer, public speakers, tutorials on how to become a poll worker and get-out-the-vote programming.

Ziklag, a secretive organization of wealthy Christians, funds the Courage Tour, according to previously unreported documents obtained by ProPublica and Documented. A private donor video produced by Ziklag said the group intended to spend $700,000 in 2024 to mobilize Christian voters by funding “targeted rallies in swing states” led by Lance Wallnau, the pro-Trump influencer.

Even before the Vance event, ProPublica previously reported that tax experts believed Ziklag’s 2024 election-related efforts could be in violation of tax law. The Vance event, they said, raised even more red flags about whether a tax-exempt charity had improperly benefited the Trump-Vance campaign.

According to Texas corporation records, the Courage Tour is a project of Lance Wallnau Ministries Inc., a 501(c)(3) charity led by Wallnau. There have been five Courage Tour events this year, and Vance is the only top-of-the-ticket candidate to appear at any of them.

Wallnau has said that Vice President Kamala Harris is possessed by “the spirit of Jezebel” and practices “witchcraft.” As ProPublica reported, Wallnau is also an adviser to Ziklag, whose long-term goal is to help conservative Christians “take dominion” over the most important areas of American society, such as education, government and entertainment.

The Vance campaign portion was tucked in between Courage Tour events, and organizers took pains to say that Wallnau’s podcast hosted the hourlong segment, not the Courage Tour. Two signs near the stage said Wallnau’s podcast was hosting Vance. And during Vance’s conversation with a local pastor, the Courage Tour’s logo was replaced by the Trump-Vance logo on the screen.

An email sent by the Courage Tour to prospective attendees promoted the rally and Vance’s appearance as distinct events but advertised them side by side:

But the lines between those events blurred in a way that tax-law experts said could create legal problems for Wallnau, the Courage Tour and Ziklag. The appearance took place at the same venue, on the same stage and with the same audience as the rest of the Courage Tour. That email to people who might attend assured them that they could remain in their same seats to watch Vance and that afterward, “We will seamlessly return to the Courage Tour programming.”

The Trump-Vance campaign promoted the event as “part of the Courage Tour” and said Vance’s remarks would take place “during the Courage Tour.” And although the appearance included a discussion of addiction and homelessness, Vance criticized President Joe Biden in his remarks and urged audience members to vote and get others to vote as well in November.

Later in the day, Wallnau took the stage and asked for donations from the crowd. As he did, he spoke of Vance’s appearance as if it were part of the Courage Tour. “People have been coming up to us, my staff, and saying we want to help you out, what can we do, how do we do this? I want you to know when we do a Courage Tour, which will be back in the area, when we’re in different parts of the country,” he said. Asking for a show of hands, Wallnau added: “How many of you would like to at least be knowing when we’re there? Who’s with us on the team? If we have another JD Vance or Donald Trump or somebody?”

An employee of Wallnau’s, Mercedes Sparks, peeked out from behind a curtain. “I just wanted to clarify: You said they came to the Courage Tour,” Sparks said. “They didn’t. For legal reasons, the podcast hosted that. It was very separate. I don’t need the IRS coming my way.”

Despite the disclaimers, Vance’s campaign appearance at the Courage Tour raises legal red flags for several reasons, according to experts in tax and election law.

Both Lance Wallnau Ministries and Ziklag are 501(c)(3) charities, the same legal designation as the Boys & Girls Club or the United Way. People who donate to charities like these can deduct their gift on their annual taxes. But under the law, such charities are “absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office,” according to the IRS.

Internal Ziklag records lay out how the Courage Tour could influence the 2024 election. “Our plan,” one private video states, “is to mobilize grassroots support in seven key swing states through large-scale rallies, each anticipated to attract between 5,000 and 15,000 participants. These ‘Fire and Glory’ rallies will primarily target counties critical to the 2024 election outcome.” Wallnau said he later changed the name of his swing-state tour from Fire and Glory to the Courage Tour, saying the original name “sounds like a Pentecostal rally.”

Four nonpartisan tax experts told ProPublica and Documented that a political campaign event hosted by one charitable group, which is in turn funded by another charitable group, could run afoul of the ban on direct or indirect campaign intervention by a charitable organization. They added that Wallnau’s attempt to carve out Vance’s appearance may not, in the eyes of the IRS, be sufficient to avoid creating tax-law problems.

“Here, the [Trump] campaign is getting the people in their seats, who have come to the c-3’s event,” Ellen Aprill, an expert on political activities by charitable groups and a retired law professor at Loyola Law School, wrote in an email. “I would say this is over the line into campaign intervention but that it is a close call — and that exempt organization lawyers generally advise clients NOT to get too close to the line!”

Roger Colinvaux, a professor at Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law, said that regulators consider whether a consumer would be able to distinguish the charitable event from the political activity. Does the public know these are clearly separate entities, or is it difficult to distinguish whether it’s a charity or a for-profit company that’s hosting a political event?

“If it looks like the (c)(3) is creating the audience, then that again is potentially an issue,” he said.

Ziklag, Wallnau and the Vance campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

Marcus Owens, a tax lawyer at Loeb and Loeb and a former director of the IRS’ exempt organizations division, said there were past examples of the agency cracking down on religious associations for political activity similar in nature to Vance’s Courage Tour appearance.

In the 1980s, the Pentecostal televangelist Jimmy Swaggart used his personal column in his ministry’s magazine to endorse evangelist Pat Robertson’s campaign for president. Even though the regular column, titled “From Me to You,” was billed as Swaggart’s personal opinion, the IRS said that it still crossed the line into illegal political campaign intervention. Swaggart had also endorsed Robertson’s campaign for president during a religious service.

In that case, the IRS audited Swaggart’s organization and, as a result, the organization publicly admitted that it had violated tax law.

Phil Hackney, a professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh who spent five years in the IRS’ Office of Chief Counsel, said the fundamental question with Vance’s Courage Tour event is whether the 501(c)(3) charity that hosted the event covered the cost of Vance’s appearance.

“If the (c)(3) bore the cost, they’re in trouble,” Hackney said. “If they didn’t, they should be fine.” The whole arrangement, he added, has “got its problems. It’s really dicey.”

And even though Ziklag did not directly host the Vance event, tax experts say that its funding of the Courage Tour — as described in the group’s internal documents — could be seen as indirect campaign intervention, which federal tax law prohibits.

“The regulations make it clear that 501(c)(3) organizations cannot intervene in campaigns directly or indirectly,” Samuel Brunson, a law professor at Loyola University Chicago, said. “So the fact that it’s not Ziklag putting on the event doesn’t insulate Ziklag.”

Potential tax-law violations aren’t the only legal issue raised by Vance’s appearance.

Federal election law prohibits corporations from donating directly to political campaigns. For example, General Motors, as a company, cannot give money to a presidential campaign. That ban also applies to nonprofits that are legally organized as corporations.

Election experts said that if the funding for the Vance appearance did come from a corporation, whether for-profit or nonprofit, that could be viewed as an in-kind contribution to the Trump-Vance campaign.

Do you have any information about Ziklag or the Christian right’s plans for 2024 that we should know? Andy Kroll can be reached by email at andy.kroll@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 202-215-6203.

Conservatives aimed at reducing access to abortion

OTTAWA — The NDP is looking to push back against what it calls a "creep" of legislation, petitions and threats from the

. Leader Jagmeet Singh says his party will use its next opposition day to force the House of Commons to debate and vote on a motion that calls for urgent action to improve abortion access. Speaking in Montreal, Singh also called out the governing Liberals, saying they haven't done enough to improve abortion access in Canada. The NDP in its press release cited several examples of what it called "anti-choice" moves from the Tories, including a petition presented earlier this year by a Conservative MP that claimed more than 98 per cent of abortions "are for reasons of social or personal convenience."

Elon Musk's secret talks with Putin ramped up during his Twitter takeover: WSJ report

Elon Musk's secret talks with Putin ramped up during his Twitter takeover: WSJ report I guess Elon is above the law too. You can't give out checks to vote!

BP Scraps Target of Reducing Oil Production by 2030

BP Scraps Target of Reducing Oil Production by 2030Oil major BP has scrapped its goal of reducing oil and gas production by the end of the decade, angering environmental groups who say the company is prioritizing profits over the planet. According to three sources who have knowledge on the matter, BP CEO Murray Auchincloss scaled back the company’s energy transition plans in order to regain investor confidence, reported Reuters. “As Murray said at the start of the year in our fourth-quarter results, the direction is the same but we are going to deliver as a simpler, more focused and higher-value company,” a spokesperson for BP said, as The Times reported. In 2020, BP unveiled an ambitious strategy to reduce its production by 40 percent, while quickly ramping up renewables by 2030, reported Reuters. In February of 2023, the London-based company pared back the reduction goal to 25 percent, as investors concentrated on near-term profits instead of the energy transition.

Greg Abbott Boasted That Texas Removed 6,500 Noncitizens From Its Voter Rolls. That Number Was Likely Inflated.

by Vianna Davila and Lexi Churchill, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, James Barragán, The Texas Tribune, and Natalia Contreras, Votebeat

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

Reporting Highlights

• Mistaken Identities: Reporters found at least nine people incorrectly labeled as noncitizens or removed from Texas voter rolls because they did not respond to letters about their citizenship.
• Election Misinformation: Texas state officials, including the attorney general, are pushing the claim that noncitizens plan to vote in U.S. elections.
• Fuzzy Math: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said 6,500 potential noncitizens were cut from the state’s voter rolls. But most simply didn’t respond to mailed queries about their citizenship.

These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.

In late August, with a hotly contested presidential election less than three months away, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott boasted that the state had removed more than 1 million ineligible voters from its rolls, including more than 6,500 noncitizens.

The Republican governor said the Texas secretary of state’s office was turning over nearly 2,000 of those characterized as noncitizens to Attorney General Ken Paxton for investigation because records showed they had a voting history.

“Illegal voting in Texas will never be tolerated,” Abbott said in a press release.

The former registered voters whom Abbott called noncitizens, and the other people removed from the rolls since September 2021, were taken off through a routine practice local election officials conduct that includes culling the names of people who have moved or died. Election experts have urged caution in using the numbers to make definitive statements about registered noncitizens.

But Abbott did just that, initially stating in his news release that thousands of noncitizens had been stripped from the rolls.

His office then edited the press release after publication, softening it by adding the word “potential” before noncitizens.

Abbott’s claims helped to fan ongoing unsubstantiated Republican allegations that noncitizens plan to cast ballots en masse to sway elections for Democrats, assertions that former President Donald Trump and his party are using to cast doubt on the integrity of the upcoming November election.

An investigation by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and Votebeat, however, found that the governor’s claims about noncitizens on the rolls appear inflated and, in some cases, wrong.

The secretary of state’s office identified 581 people, not 6,500, as noncitizens, according to a report it gave Abbott in late August that the newsrooms obtained through a public information request.

In response to questions about the basis for Abbott’s larger number, the secretary of state’s office told the news organizations that it had “verbally” provided the governor’s office with a separate number of people removed from the rolls who failed to respond to letters alerting them that there were questions about their citizenship.

The governor’s news release combined the two figures.

That means U.S. citizens who simply never received or responded to such letters are almost certainly included in Abbott’s 6,500 number. Abbott did not respond to requests for comment, and Secretary of State Jane Nelson declined to be interviewed.

After attempting to contact more than 70 people across both categories, the news organizations have so far found at least nine U.S. citizens in three Texas counties who were incorrectly labeled as noncitizens or removed from the rolls because they did not respond to the letters about their citizenship. In each case, they showed reporters copies of their birth certificates to confirm their citizenship, or reporters verified their citizenship using state records.

One of them is 21-year-old Jakylah Ockleberry.

Ockleberry, a native Texan who provided the news organizations with a copy of her birth certificate, had only left the state twice in her life, including a recent trip to California.

She had no idea Travis County had mislabeled her as a noncitizen until the news organizations contacted her. “How would something like that happen?”

When the governor’s press release came out, election experts and local officials were worried about cases such as Ockleberry’s, saying the press release implied officials had confirmed the noncitizen status of 6,500 people when they had not.

Five years ago, Texas officials suggested that nearly 100,000 noncitizens were registered to vote and that nearly half of them had cast ballots. Those claims quickly unraveled under scrutiny and spurred a lawsuit and settlement that now governs how Texas can flag someone as a potential noncitizen.

Asked whether the nine people the news organizations identified as U.S. citizens were included in Abbott’s latest figure, the secretary of state’s office said it could not confirm or deny the inclusion of any specific people. Local election officials said they don’t know which voters were included in Abbott’s tally, but emphasized the data originates at the county level.

The discrepancies show the pitfalls inherent in using this data to make assertions about noncitizens.

In Ockleberry’s case, as well as those of four others the newsrooms identified in Travis County, election workers should have selected a code that indicated the voters had moved. Instead, they mistakenly selected a code for noncitizens.

Bruce Elfant, the Travis County tax assessor-collector and voter registrar, acknowledged the errors made by his office. But he also said the numbers suggested that noncitizen voting “is an infinitesimal, small issue.”

Routine maintenance of voter rolls is important, and if noncitizens are registered, they should be removed, said Marc Meredith, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on election administration.

But Meredith said Abbott’s decision to announce without explanation that 6,500 noncitizens were removed from the rolls, and to initially do so without qualifying that these were only potential noncitizens, “reduces trust in the Texas voter registration process in an unnecessary way.”

Routine Maintenance, Political Purpose

Voter rolls are naturally fluid. People move, die, become citizens and turn 18. Election officials across the country are constantly adding and removing people for legitimate reasons.

“So long as we have requirements about keeping lists clean, and so long as we don’t have a police state that has a single database with all of our names in it, like in much of the rest of the world, including democratic nations, we’re going to come across these sorts of problems,” said Charles Stewart III, director of the MIT Election Data and Science Lab.

Elfant, for one, said he was frustrated by Abbott’s public promotion of voter removal data. He said the governor’s press release created confusion among residents who feared they might have been wrongly removed and would not be able to cast ballots in the upcoming presidential election.

“It scared a lot of people. We’ve received a lot of phone calls and emails from people who are concerned that they’re not on the voter rolls,” Elfant said.

Any number of things can trigger a question about a voter’s eligibility.

For example, county registrars contact anyone who has marked on a jury summons that they’re not a citizen. The registrars need to confirm if that’s true, because it would mean the person is also ineligible to vote. The secretary of state’s office also gets information weekly from the Texas Department of Public Safety about people who have signed up for licenses and state identification and identified themselves as noncitizens. That information is then sent to counties.

In such cases, county election officials must follow up. They are required by law to notify voters and give them 30 days to respond before they’re removed from the rolls.

But election officials know those safeguards don’t always work.

“The post office messes up. We get a lot of cards back or mail back that says ‘undeliverable’ and the person will be like, ‘I’ve lived at this address for 20 years and I’ve never moved,’” said Trudy Hancock, elections administrator in Republican-leaning Brazos County, home to Texas A&M University. “So you have to consider that there are outside circumstances that can affect our efforts to reach them.”

Failure to respond to a letter questioning someone’s citizenship is not a confirmation that they are not a citizen, election officials said.

The 2019 episode, when the secretary of state’s office announced that it had identified 95,000 registered voters as potential noncitizens and said that more than half of them had previously cast ballots, highlighted failures in the process.

Paxton, the attorney general, immediately turned to social media, posting “VOTER FRAUD ALERT.” Abbott thanked Paxton and the secretary of state’s office on Twitter for “uncovering and investigating this illegal vote registration.” Trump also piled on with a tweet calling the state’s numbers “just the tip of the iceberg.”

Voting rights groups sued, decrying the state’s efforts as deliberate attempts to suppress the votes of actual citizens. Texas’ assertions didn’t hold up. Many of the flagged registered voters turned out to be naturalized citizens whom the state incorrectly identified as ineligible because it was using outdated DPS data from driver’s license and state identification card applications. (DPS did not respond to a request for comment for this story.)

The state settled the case and agreed to only flag people with the secretary of state’s office if they identify as noncitizens when applying for a new ID with DPS and if they previously registered to vote.

State officials should be transparent about how they arrived at the latest assertions, said David Becker, executive director and founder of The Center for Election Innovation & Research.

The state appears to have presented a figure without fully explaining its methodology or double-checking the information, said Becker, who is a former senior trial attorney in the voting section of the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

If the governor presented this data in a court of law without evidence, Becker believes it wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny.

“Their claims would likely be dismissed until they could come up with something that actually documents how they got to those numbers,” he said.

Labeled Noncitizens

When Justin Comer, 29, heard that the state had removed thousands of noncitizens from the voter rolls, it never occurred to him that he might be one of them. Comer was born in Harris County, the home of Houston, and grew up in conservative Montgomery County just outside the city. He said he’d been registered to vote there since he was 18 and had cast ballots in presidential elections since then.

“I’ve always been interested in especially local politics, and just making sure I stay up to date with that,” Comer said in a phone interview. “I’m always pushing my wife now, I’m like, ‘Hey, we need to stay active in that respect and do our part.’”

It wasn’t until the news organizations contacted him that he made the connection between a peculiar voter registration issue he encountered last year and the Republican leaders’ sweeping noncitizen voting claims.

In 2023, he received a notice from the county elections office that he’d been flagged as a potential noncitizen. He needed to show proof of his citizenship in the next 30 days or his registration would be canceled. The letter Comer received indicated he’d said he wasn’t a citizen in a response to a jury summons. Comer assumes he clicked the wrong button when responding to the notice online; he had meant to reply that he had moved. He’s now registered to vote in Collin County, where he lives.

“I was more just confused,” Comer said. “I’ve lived in Texas my whole life. It was never a question for me.”

In some cases, it’s unclear what happened. Diana Colon spent much of her life in the mountains of Puerto Rico, in the town of Aibonito, but moved to El Paso County on the far western edge of Texas in 2018 to be closer to her daughter.

She was surprised when she learned the county had kicked her off its voter rolls after she apparently failed to respond to a question about her citizenship. Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory, and she is an American citizen. She showed a copy of her birth certificate to a reporter.

“That’s crazy,” she said.

Colon does not recall registering to vote, though the county said it received an application from her at some point in which she did not answer a question about her citizenship. Public information the county provided the news organizations indicated she was flagged as a potential noncitizen in DPS data.

Colon has since moved to California but would like to return to the El Paso area and would register to vote, if only to clear up the fact that she can. “I wouldn’t like people saying I’m not a U.S. citizen,” she said in an interview.

There are almost certainly additional U.S. citizens among the thousands of removed voters Abbott characterized as noncitizens. For example, reporters identified Texas birth certificates for another two voters whose registrations in Montgomery County were canceled for not responding to questions about their citizenship. The news organizations could not reach those voters for comment.

Noncitizens have occasionally voted, but experts say these cases are rare and there is no evidence that they affect election outcomes. Noncitizens who vote face criminal penalties, including the loss of their residency status and deportation. In 2017, Rosa Ortega, a U.S. permanent resident living in North Texas, said she believed her green card authorized her to vote and cast five ballots over a decade. A Tarrant County jury convicted her of voter fraud and sentenced her to eight years in prison.

Meredith, the University of Pennsylvania elections expert, said he wouldn’t be surprised if some people removed from the Texas rolls are indeed noncitizens who had cast ballots in a previous election. But that doesn’t mean the problem is widespread. “You shouldn’t use the fact there may be a few as evidence that it happens all the time,” Meredith said.

Reporters also found some noncitizens, including two who said they had inadvertently registered after receiving what they said were unsolicited voter registration applications, an ongoing concern for Republicans who believe this kind of outreach will result in large numbers of noncitizens signing up to cast a ballot. One got the application from a voting advocacy group. But the other got it while filling out other state paperwork.

In both cases, they had truthfully filled out the form and said they were noncitizens. Neither voted. Election workers in the two counties involved, Collin and Travis, said those voter registration applications should not have been processed because the applicants identified themselves as noncitizens and both people were added to the rolls through clerical error.

One of them, Austin resident Son Mai, had no idea he had ever been on the rolls until a reporter contacted him.

The news organizations viewed three voter registration applications from Mai in which he checked a box saying he was not a U.S. citizen. They interviewed Mai, who is originally from Vietnam and speaks limited English, through an interpreter.

Mai, who has been a permanent resident and green card holder for over 40 years, receives Social Security disability benefits and food stamps. Voter registration applications are included with that paperwork, which he believes is how he was mistakenly signed up.

However, Mai always marked that he is not a U.S. citizen on the forms, the county confirmed. As a result, Travis County should have automatically rejected his application, but elections officials said he was accidentally added to the rolls instead. The county confirmed Mai has never voted, though he said he hopes to become a naturalized citizen.

“I told them I couldn’t vote,” he told the reporters. “I never vote.”

Building a Case

With the election less than a month away, claims about noncitizen voting have continued to ratchet up despite numerous elections experts saying such instances are very rare. These efforts can have significant consequences.

The Republican National Committee filed a lawsuit last month in Nevada alleging that nearly 4,000 noncitizens may have cast ballots in the 2020 presidential election and that thousands could vote in the coming election. (Nevada’s former secretary of state, who is Republican, did not find evidence to substantiate the 2020 claims during an investigation at the time).

Last month, the Justice Department filed suit against Alabama after its secretary of state flagged more than 3,000 alleged noncitizens and instructed county officials to remove any noncitizens from their voter rolls, although systemic voter roll cleaning is illegal so close to a federal election. In a statement, the Justice Department said its review found that naturalized and native-born American citizens had been caught up in the effort.

In Texas, both Abbott and Paxton have promoted claims of noncitizens seeking to vote in the November election.

On a single day in August, Paxton said his office would investigate an allegation that nonprofits were setting up booths outside state driver’s license offices and signing up noncitizens to vote, which followed an unfounded claim peddled by a Fox News host, and announced his agency had raided homes in three South Texas counties to investigate allegations of voter fraud. The next day, the attorney general appeared on the radio show of conservative personality Glenn Beck pushing debunked claims that President Joe Biden is allowing immigrants to enter the country illegally so they can vote for Democrats in elections.

In recent weeks, Paxton put out a flurry of news releases, continuing the hunt for noncitizen voters.

Paxton, who did not respond to a request for comment, sent a public letter to Nelson, the secretary of state, last month urging her to demand the federal government’s assistance in identifying potential noncitizens on the rolls.

But Nelson, a Republican and an Abbott appointee, apparently didn’t move aggressively enough for Paxton. In an Oct. 2 news release, the attorney general expressed frustration with Nelson, saying she had not provided the federal government any information about the possible noncitizens. He then asked Nelson’s office to provide him with the list of names so he could send it on to the government himself.

Hours later, Nelson provided Paxton the voter records for anyone who does not have a Texas driver’s license or identification card number on file in its statewide voter registration system. The list was accompanied by an explicit warning.

“The records do not reflect, and are in no way indicative of, a list of potential non-United States citizens on the State’s voter rolls,” Nelson wrote.

Dan Keemahill of ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, Alejandra Martinez of The Texas Tribune and Thomas Wilburn of Votebeat contributed data research and reporting.

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