Asa Hutchinson announces presidential bid, says Trump should withdraw from race

Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson is running for president in 2024, he said Sunday.

“I am going to be running. And the reason, as I've traveled the country for six months, I hear people talk about the leadership of our country, and I'm convinced that people want leaders that appeal to the best of America, and not simply appeal to our worst instincts,” Hutchinson said during an interview with Jonathan Karl on ABC’s “This Week.” “I believe I can be that kind of leader for the people of America.”

Hutchinson will make a formal announcement later this month in Bentonville, Arkansas, he said.

Hutchinson is entering the GOP primary at a tumultuous time in the race, as its current frontrunner, former President Donald Trump, faces an indictment stemming from a case related to hush money paid to porn star Stormy Daniels during Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

On Sunday, Hutchinson, a former federal prosecutor, reiterated the call he first made Friday for Trump to withdraw from the race.

“Well he should,” Hutchinson said, when asked whether Trump should pull out of the race. “But at the same time, we know he's not [going to]. And there's not any constitutional requirement.”

The indictment will become too big of a “sideshow,” Hutchinson said, adding that the former president should focus on his defense instead of another bid for the White House.

“I mean, first of all, the office is more important than any individual person. And so for the sake of the office of the presidency, I do think that’s too much of a sideshow and distraction, and he needs to be able to concentrate on his due process,” Hutchinson said, acknowledging that the former president should be presumed innocent of the charges, which the Manhattan District Attorney’s office have yet to publicly unveil.

Hutchinson joins what’s expected to be a competitive Republican primary. In addition to Trump, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and conservative entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy have launched campaigns, and several others have said they’re considering joining the fray.

So far, Hutchinson is the only candidate or speculative candidate to call on Trump to remove himself from the race. Others have condemned the investigation as a partisan attack by Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan District Attorney who brought the case to the grand jury. Haley described the case as more about “revenge” than justice; Former Vice President Mike Pence called the indictment “an outrage”; Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said the move was “un-American.”

Hutchinson has also been critical of the case. “I don't like the idea of the charges from what I've seen coming out of New York,” he said Sunday. “But the process has got to work, and we've got to have respect for our criminal justice system, but also for the office of presidency.”

from Politics, Policy, Political News Top Stories https://ift.tt/NdJK3OH
via IFTTT

Read More

At least 26 dead after tornadoes rake Midwest, South

WYNNE, Ark. — Storms that dropped possibly dozens of tornadoes killed at least 26 people in small towns and big cities across the South and Midwest, tearing a path through the Arkansas capital, collapsing the roof of a packed concert venue in Illinois and stunning people throughout the region Saturday with the damage’s scope.

Confirmed or suspected tornadoes in at least eight states destroyed homes and businesses, splintered trees and laid waste to neighborhoods across a broad swath of the country. The dead included at least nine in one Tennessee county, four in the small town of Wynne, Arkansas, three in Sullivan, Indiana, and four in Illinois.

Other deaths from the storms that hit Friday night into Saturday were reported in Alabama and Mississippi, along with one near Little Rock, Arkansas, where city officials said more than 2,600 buildings were in a tornado’s path.

Residents of Wynne, a community of about 8,000 people 50 miles west of Memphis, Tennessee, woke Saturday to find the high school’s roof shredded and its windows blown out. Huge trees lay on the ground, their stumps reduced to nubs. Broken walls, windows and roofs pocked homes and businesses.

Debris lay scattered inside the shells of homes and on lawns: clothing, insulation, toys, splintered furniture, a pickup truck with its windows shattered.

Ashley Macmillan said she, her husband and their children huddled with their dogs in a small bathroom as a tornado passed, “praying and saying goodbye to each other, because we thought we were dead.” A falling tree seriously damaged their home, but they were unhurt.

“We could feel the house shaking, we could hear loud noises, dishes rattling. And then it just got calm,” she said.

Recovery was already underway, with workers using chainsaws and bulldozers to clear the area and utility crews restoring power.

Nine people died in Tennessee’s McNairy County, east of Memphis, according to Patrick Sheehan, director the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency.

“The majority of the damage has been done to homes and residential areas,” said David Leckner, the mayor of Adamsville.

Gov. Bill Lee drove to the county Saturday to tour the destruction and comfort residents. He said the storm capped the “worst” week of his time as governor, coming days after a school shooting in Nashville that killed six people including a family friend whose funeral he and his wife, Maria, attended earlier in the day.

“It’s terrible what has happened in this community, this county, this state,” Lee said. “But it looks like your community has done what Tennessean communities do, and that is rally and respond.”

Jeffrey Day said he called his daughter after seeing on the news that their community of Adamsville was being hit. Huddled in a closet with her 2-year-old son as the storm passed over, she answered the phone screaming.

“She kept asking me, ‘What do I do, daddy?’” Day said, tearing up. “I didn’t know what to say.”

After the storm passed, his daughter crawled out of her destroyed home and over barbed wire and drove to nearby family. On Saturday evening, baby clothes were still strewn about the site.

In Memphis, police spokesman Christopher Williams said via email late Saturday that there were three deaths believed to be weather-related: two children and an adult who died when a tree fell on a house.

Tennessee officials warned that the same weather conditions from Friday night are expected to return Tuesday.

In Belvidere, Illinois, part of the roof of the Apollo Theatre collapsed as about 260 people were attending a heavy metal concert. A 50-year-old man was pulled from the rubble.

“I sat with him and I held his hand and I was (telling him), ‘It’s going to be OK.’ I didn’t really know much else what to do,” concertgoer Gabrielle Lewellyn told WTVO-TV.

The man was dead by the time emergency workers arrived. Officials said 40 others were hurt, including two with life-threatening injuries.

Crews cleaned up around the Apollo on Saturday, with forklifts pulling away loose bricks. Business owners picked up glass shards and covered shattered windows.

In Crawford County, Illinois, three people were killed and eight injured when a tornado hit around New Hebron, said Bill Burke, the county board chair.

Sheriff Bill Rutan said 60 to 100 families were displaced.

“We’ve had emergency crews digging people out of their basements because the house is collapsed on top of them, but luckily they had that safe space to go to,” Rutan said at a news conference.

That tornado was not far from where three people died in Indiana’s Sullivan County, about 95 miles southwest of Indianapolis.

Sullivan Mayor Clint Lamb said at a news conference that an area south of the county seat of about 4,000 “is essentially unrecognizable right now” and several people were rescued overnight. There were reports of as many as 12 people injured, he said.

“I’m really, really shocked there isn’t more as far as human issues,” he said, adding that recovery “is going to be a very long process.”

In the Little Rock area, at least one person was killed and more than 50 were hurt, some critically.

The National Weather Service said that tornado was a high-end EF3 twister with wind speeds up to 165 mph and a path as long as 25 miles.

Masoud Shahed-Ghaznavi was lunching at home when it roared through his neighborhood, causing him to hide in the laundry room as sheetrock fell and windows shattered. When he emerged, the house was mostly rubble.

“Everything around me is sky,” Shahed-Ghaznavi recalled Saturday. He barely slept Friday night.

“When I closed my eyes, I couldn’t sleep, imagined I was here,” he said Saturday outside his home.

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders declared a state of emergency and activated the National Guard. On Saturday, Sanders requested a major disaster declaration from President Joe Biden to support recovery efforts with federal resources.

Another suspected tornado killed a woman in northern Alabama’s Madison County, officials said, and in northern Mississippi’s Pontotoc County, authorities confirmed one death and four injuries.

Tornadoes also caused damage in eastern Iowa and broke windows northeast of Peoria, Illinois.

The storms struck just hours after Biden visited Rolling Fork, Mississippi, where tornadoes last week destroyed parts of town.

It could take days to determine the exact number of tornadoes from the latest event, said Bill Bunting, chief of forecast operations at the Storm Prediction Center. There were also hundreds of reports of large hail and damaging winds, he said.

“That’s a quite active day,” he said. “But that’s not unprecedented.”

More than 530,000 homes and businesses were without power as of midday Saturday, over 200,000 of them in Ohio, according to PowerOutage.us.

The sprawling storm system also brought wildfires to the southern Plains, with authorities in Oklahoma reporting nearly 100 of them Friday. At least 32 people were said to be injured, and more than 40 homes destroyed.

The storms also caused blizzard conditions in the Upper Midwest.

A threat of tornadoes and hail remained for the Northeast including in parts of Pennsylvania and New York.

from Politics, Policy, Political News Top Stories https://ift.tt/oVJYAT6
via IFTTT

Read More

‘Absurd and destructive’: Zelenskyy slams Russia’s U.N. Security Council presidency

Moscow will hold the largely symbolic United Nations post for the month of April.

from Politics, Policy, Political News Top Stories https://ift.tt/6wDl3Ef
via IFTTT

Read More

Elon Musk, for impacting Twitter's hate speech

from Politics, Policy, Political News Top Stories https://ift.tt/40EpIzY
via IFTTT

Read More

April fools? The Twitter blue check apocalypse that wasn’t

Verified Twitter users who said goodbye to their coveted blue check marks overnight awoke Saturday morning to a surprise — the blue checks were still there, leading some to suggest an elaborate April Fools’ prank was at play.

On March 23, Twitter announced that it would phase out the old system of verification and strip legacy verified accounts of their blue checks starting April 1, making the former symbol of authenticity available for purchase without verification for $8 through the app’s new “Twitter Blue” function.

The new pay-to-verify policy raised concerns when Twitter owner Elon Musk debuted Twitter Blue in November 2022, causing immediate chaos on the platform.

Without any weight behind the symbol of authentication that the blue check mark provided, any Twitter user could hypothetically pay to impersonate a public figure or company.

In the days leading up to Saturday’s supposed blue check apocalypse, legacy verified accounts from Lebron James to Monica Lewinsky tweeted out against the new policy.

Major news organizations, including the New York Times, Washington Post and CNN, announced this week that they would not pay for staff members to maintain a blue check status. The White House sent an email to staffers informing them that it would not pay for Twitter Blue.

Former vice president of global commerce and media at Twitter, Nathan Hubbard, tweeted on Friday that phasing out verification was a “risky” policy change and that, “If most OG blue checks stop tweeting in protest of being asked to pay to create the content that Twitter lives by…Twitter dies.”

After previously tweeting that “paid account social media will be the only social media that matters,” Musk was noticeably silent Saturday on the lack of discernible change in the app’s interface, only retweeting an advertisement first posted by Tesla’s company account and an old photograph of himself with the caption, “Me after 1 day of not eating sugar.”

Twitter’s communications office was unreachable for comment.

And as of noon on April Fools’ Day, the previously verified blue checks remained.

from Politics, Policy, Political News Top Stories https://ift.tt/4U1eZNW
via IFTTT

Read More

At least 18 dead after tornadoes rake Midwest, South

WYNNE, Ark. — Storms that dropped possibly dozens of tornadoes killed at least 18 people in small towns and big cities across the South and Midwest, tearing a path through the Arkansas capital, collapsing the roof of a packed concert venue in Illinois, and leaving people throughout the region bewildered Saturday by the damage.

Confirmed or suspected tornadoes in at least seven states destroyed homes and businesses, splintered trees, and lay waste to neighborhoods across a swath of the country home to some 85 million people. The dead included seven in Tennessee's McNairy County, four in the small town of Wynne, Arkansas, and three in Sullivan, Indiana.

Other deaths were reported in Alabama, Illinois and Mississippi, along with one near Little Rock, where the mayor said more than 2,000 buildings were in a tornado's path.

Stunned residents of Wynne, a community of about 8,000 people 50 miles west of Memphis, Tennessee, woke Saturday to find the high school's roof shredded and its windows blown out. Huge trees lay on the ground, their stumps reduced to nubs. Broken walls, windows and roofs pocked homes and businesses.

Debris and memories of regular life lay scattered inside the damaged shells of homes and strewn on lawns: clothing, insulation, roofing paper, toys, splintered furniture, a pickup truck with its windows shattered.

“I’m sad that my town has been hit so hard,” said Heidi Jenkins, a salon owner. “Our school is gone, my church is gone. I’m sad for all the people who lost their homes.”

Recovery was already underway, with workers using chain saws to cut fallen trees and bulldozers moving material from shattered structures. Utility trucks worked to restore power. Groups of volunteers gathered to plan their day.

Seven people died in McNairy County, east of Memphis along the Mississippi border, said David Leckner, the mayor of Adamsville.

“The majority of the damage has been done to homes and residential areas,” Leckner said, adding that although it appeared all people had been accounted for, crews were going door to door to be sure.

In Belvidere, Illinois, some of the 260 people attending a heavy metal concert at the Apollo Theatre pulled a man from the rubble after part of the roof collapsed; he was dead when emergency workers arrived. Officials said 28 other people were injured at the theater, some severely.

“They dragged someone out from the rubble, and I sat with him and I held his hand and I was (telling him) ‘It’s going to be OK.’ I didn’t really know much else what to do," concertgoer Gabrielle Lewellyn told WTVO-TV.

The venue's Facebook page said the bands scheduled to perform were Morbid Angel, Crypta, Skeletal Remains and Revocation.

Crews worked Saturday to clean up around the Apollo, with forklifts pulling away loosely hanging bricks. Business owners picked up shards of glass and covered shattered windows.

Three people died in Indiana's Sullivan County, near the Illinois line about 95 miles southwest of Indianapolis.

Sullivan Mayor Clint Lamb said at a news conference that an area south of the county seat of about 4,000 “is essentially unrecognizable right now" and that several people were rescued from rubble overnight. There were reports of as many as 12 people injured, he said, and search-and-rescue teams combed damaged areas.

“Quite frankly, I’m really, really shocked there isn’t more as far as human issues,” he said, adding that recovery “is going to be a very long process.”

In the Little Rock area, at least one person was killed and more than two dozen were hurt, some critically, authorities said. Little Rock Mayor Frank Scott said that 2,100 homes and businesses were in the tornado's path, but that no assessment had been done on how many were damaged.

Joanna McFadden was at a nail salon with two other people when the tornado struck.

“The only way we knew the tornado was coming, the leaves were swirling, that’s the only way we knew, it looked like it was standing still,” McFadden said. She and the others took shelter in the back.

Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders activated 100 members of the National Guard to help local authorities respond.

A suspected tornado killed a woman in northern Alabama’s Madison County, said county official Mac McCutcheon. And in northern Mississippi's Pontotoc County, officials confirmed one death and four injuries.

The storms struck just hours after President Joe Biden visited the Mississippi community of Rolling Fork, where tornadoes last week destroyed parts of town.

In western Tennessee, Tipton County Sheriff Shannon Beasley wrote on Facebook early Saturday that there was “much devastation” and “some severe injuries" but no reports of deaths yet. But he said many families “lost homes that were leveled to the ground.”

Tornadoes also caused sporadic damage in eastern Iowa, including one just west of Iowa City, home to the University of Iowa. Television footage showed toppled power poles and roofs ripped off buildings and homes in the area.

It could take days to determine the exact number of tornadoes, said Bill Bunting, chief of forecast operations at the Storm Prediction Center. There were also hundreds of reports of large hail and damaging winds, he said.

“That’s a quite active day. But that’s not unprecedented,” he said.

Tens of thousands lost power because of the sprawling storm system that also brought wildfires to the southern Plains and blizzard conditions to the Upper Midwest.

The number of customers in Arkansas without electricity fell from nearly 90,000 to about 52,000, according to Poweroutage.us. There were 69,000 without power in Indiana, 33,000 in Illinois and 1,300 in Oklahoma. Outages were also reported in Iowa, Missouri, Tennessee, Wisconsin and Texas.

Hail broke windows on cars and buildings northeast of Peoria, Illinois. And blizzard conditions whipped parts of Minnesota, the Dakotas and Wisconsin, cutting power to tens of thousands in the Twin Cities area. Parts of Interstate 29 were closed.

Nearly 100 new wildfires were reported Friday in Oklahoma, according to the state forest service, and firefighters hoped to gain ground against them Saturday. Fires were expected to remain a danger through the week.

Crews battled several blazes near El Dorado, Kansas, and some residents were asked to evacuate, including about 250 elementary school children who were relocated to a high school.

from Politics, Policy, Political News Top Stories https://ift.tt/0LpcUNw
via IFTTT

Read More

Trump Wants to Lead a ‘Third World Nation’

If the facts are against you,the old legal adage says, hammer the law. If the law is against you, hammer the facts. If the facts and the law are against you, hammer opposing counsel.

To that timeless judicial wisdom Donald Trump has added this codicil: If the facts are against you and so is the law and your opposing counsel survives all your doubletalk, start calling your prosecution something out of a “third world nation.” That’s precisely what the former president posted to his Truth Social account Thursday evening when news of his indictment was confirmed by the Manhattan district attorney. “The USA is now a third world nation, a nation in serious decline. So sad!” Trump wrote in all caps.

Other members of the Trump family seconded their paterfamilias’ charge. “This is third world prosecutorial misconduct. It is the opportunistic targeting of a political opponent in a campaign year,” tweeted son Eric. “The ruling party is trying to jail the opposition leader like a third world dictatorship!” repeated son Don Jr. Defeated Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake joined in, issuing a supporting statement: “Jailing your political opponents based on frivolous politically-motivated accusations is something that you’d expect to see out of third-world dictatorships or banana republicans.” Trump’s super PAC chief Taylor Budowich was only slightly off message, calling the grand jury vote the “indictment of a failed nation.”

Stating simply that he was innocent might have been the more prudent — and accurate — alternative. But prudence and accuracy have never been in Trump’s toolkit, nor has respect for the court. Ever since he appeared on the political horizon — hell, ever since he grew out of short pants — Trump has scorned and degraded practically every democratic institution that has limited or challenged him.

When elections go against him, he bashed the election as corrupt. When the courts defied him, he torched the judges as “so-called” or having “an agenda” or making political judgments rather than judicial ones or of “disgracing the judiciary.” In 2020, he demanded, with little rationale, that Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg recuse themselves from any case involving him. In Trump’s hermetically sealed world, the only evidence needed to declare corruption or banana republichood was that a ruling had gone against him.

Other presidents have clashed with the judiciary, the intelligence community, federal law enforcement and the civil service, but never to the Trumpian extreme of challenging the institutions’ legitimacy. If there is anything remotely “third world” about the United States, the malicious odor of Donald Trump cannot be distant from the stink. The unfounded slurs Trump flings at the courts and the election processes are the sort of acts that “third-world dictators” commit. Trump isn’t the victim of third-worldism, he’s the cause.

In fact, that Trump now faces potential accountability for his actions proves the United States is not a failed state after all.

Trump proved his absolute allegiance to third-worldism and his desire for dictatorial powers in December 2022 when he famously took to Truth Social to call for the “termination” of the U.S. Constitution to undo what he called the “massive & widespread fraud & deception” of the 2020 election. No matter what the country’s faults — and they are many — the Constitution has prevented a Mussolini or worse from taking absolute power. This demand for the termination of the Constitution and his egging on and tolerance of the Jan. 6 Capitol rioters only proves his ambition to wreck the nation if it will save his hide.

In his 2016 inaugural address, Trump exhibited his demagogic mindset by describing our nation as engulfed in “carnage” to further his personal political gain. In 2018, he ran down Haiti and the nations of Africa as “shithole” countries while discussing his opposition to immigration.

Today, with prosecutions unfolding in Manhattan and perhaps soon to come in Georgia and beyond, he’s playing a similar word game in hopes of discrediting the courts for his personal gain. In Trump’s view, America is a ruined and backward country — “third world,” as he and his clan put it — not because it resembles any such country in the world but solely because the wheels of justice have rolled up to his address. In Trump’s mind, everything has always been about him. You can’t get more “third world” than a president who instigates a riot to stall the orderly transition of power.

In a democracy, nobody is above the rule of law, not even former presidents. We see through all of his rationalizations, including his latest, which holds that if the justice system prosecutes him, America is just another shithole.

******

“Johnny’s playroom/ Is a bunker filled with sand/ He’s become a third world man.” Please listen to Steely Dan’s “Third World Man.” Send your favorite Dan tracks to Shafer.Politico@gmail.com. No new email alert subscriptions are being honored at this time. My Twitter feed grew up in Indonesia, the one-time capital of the Third World. My Mastodon account has a vacation home in Mali. My Post account is currently seasteading. My RSS feed belongs to the yet-to-be-explored Fourth World.

from Politics, Policy, Political News Top Stories https://ift.tt/v9LDeTB
via IFTTT

Read More