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Friday, December 09, 2022

BREAKING NEWS: Is Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema a Democrat? What explains her approach?

Daily News Online - She tweeted this morning: 'In a natural extension of my service since I was first elected to Congress, I have joined the growing numbers of Arizonans who reject party politics by declaring my independence from the broken partisan system in Washington and formally registering as an Arizona Independent.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN IN A NUTSHELL: Her switch of allegiance means she will avoid a head-to-head primary challenge in 2024 from progressive Rep. Ruben Gallego who had been rumored to take on the sitting senator.

06:19 EST 09 Dec 2022 , updated 07:20 EST 09 Dec 2022

'... Sinema informed Chuck Schumer of her decision yesterday.

She said: 'I don't anticipate that anything will change about the Senate structure.

'I intend to show up to work, do the same work that I always do. I just intend to show up to work as an independent.'

The senator said she has 'never really fit into a box of any political party' and is close with allies on both sides of the aisle.

In an op-ed for the Arizona Republic published on Friday, she wrote: 'There’s a disconnect between what everyday Americans want and deserve from our politics, and what political parties are offering.

'I am privileged to represent Arizonans of all backgrounds and beliefs in the U.S. Senate and am honored to travel to every corner of our state, listening to your concerns and ideas.

'While Arizonans don’t all agree on the issues, we are united in our values of hard work, common sense and independence.

'We make our own decisions, using our own judgment and lived experiences to form our beliefs. We don’t line up to do what we’re told, automatically subscribe to whatever positions the national political parties dictate or view every issue through labels that divide us.'

Sinema added that her constituents 'expect our leaders to follow that example - and set aside political games'. .

Some background'- Things began looking up for her family in 1987 when her mother and stepfather secured work and they bought a house with the help of a church.

At 14 she began taking college courses, and she finished high school a year early at 16.

✓ In two years she obtained a bachelor's degree from Brigham Young University, and she also married fellow student, Blake Dain. They later divorced.

✓ In 2005, she made her first public comment about being bisexual, when a Republican's speech insulted members of the LGBT community. She said: 'We're simply people like everyone else who want and deserve respect.'

✓ When questioned by reporters, she replied: 'Duh, I'm bisexual.'

✓ Sinema, now 45, now has a master's degree, law degree and a PhD. She worked as a social worker, a criminal defense attorney, and was a political activist in her 20s, running as an independent Green Party candidate for the Arizona House. . .

✓ She then became a Democrat and served several terms in the state Legislature. Sinema started as an overt liberal but developed a reputation for compromise among her Republican peers, laying the groundwork to tack to the center. She published a book on bipartisanship.

✓ When the 9th Congressional District was created after the 2010 Census, Sinema ran for the Phoenix-area seat as a centrist and won the 2012 election.

In 2019 she became Arizona’s first Democratic U.S. senator since 1994, the country's first openly bisexual senator, and the first female senator elected to represent Arizona in the Senate.'

PHOENIX (AP) — Two congresswomen running for U.S Senate in Arizona are crisscrossing the state, raising millions of dollars and trying to exploit every possible advantage to eke out a win in what both sides expect to be a photo-finish race.

The wild card: Angela Green, a Green Party candidate who could win votes that might have gone to Democrat Krysten Sinema, clearing a path to victory for Republican Martha McSally.

But on Thursday, Green suddenly announced she would drop out of the race and endorsed Sinema.

"After watching the debates and seeing everything, Sinema's stance on a lot of things are very close to mine," Green said in an interview with Channel 12 news in Phoenix.

The about face demonstrates the significance third party candidates are playing as Election Day nears and key races tighten across the country. There's a fear that these candidates could become "spoilers" by peeling off just enough support to let the other major party win. Democrats are especially sensitive to the issue after Green Party and Libertarian presidential candidates drew about 5 percent of the popular vote in 2016, the year that Hillary Clinton narrowly lost the presidency to Donald Trump.

"When a race is close everything matters -- every demographic group, the number of candidates on the ballot," said Nathan Gonzales, a nonpartisan analyst for Inside Elections. But, he added, that doesn't mean third party candidates will inevitably tip a close race. "We have to be a bit more nuanced."

Third party candidates tend to poll better than they actually perform on Election Day, when voters tend to revert to the two major parties. And some who cast ballots for third party candidates may not otherwise show up to the polls, so it's misleading to presume that every vote for an outside candidate is a vote stolen from a major party. . ." READ MORE

Is Kyrsten Sinema a troll?

There's been disturbing signs in the past that the senior senator from Arizona gets cheap thrills by provoking outraged reactions from her fellow travelers in the Democratic party. Most notably, of course, there was the time Sinema threw a cute little cursty while voting against a minimum wage raise she claims to "support," predictably drawing thousands of angry responses. She then released a photo provoking large swaths of Democratic voters at the height of their anger at her unwillingness to vote to end the filibuster Republicans use to block all meaningful legislation. In the photo, Sinema is seen flashing a ring that reads "f*ck off" with a smile. And then, in a move any 4chan user would envy, she dramatically increased the rage-sputtering on the left by declaring it "sexist" to be mad at her for any of this.

Sinema again pulled her signature gaslighting move — piously claiming to support legislation while actively blocking it — after the Supreme Court upheld a racist voting suppression law in her very own state on Thursday:

Again, it's worth wondering if Sinema is simply trolling here. . ." READ MORE

In a dusty basement of Brigham Young University’s Harold B. Lee Library, on a shelf of blue books with gilded trim, between a tract on the history of cosmetic surgery and a study of mystical metaphors in medieval poetry, rests the 1995 honors thesis of one Kyrsten Sinema. “Career Aspirations and Humanitarianism Among Gifted College Students” is a forgotten memento from the Arizona senator’s two years of undergraduate studies at BYU. Long before she became the most confounding actor in the drama of the Biden era, she was an Ezra Taft Benson scholar who completed her bachelor’s degree at 18. A child prodigy who, her thesis suggests, was very concerned with people like herself.

“It is ironic that part of our society suffers from a lack of resources,” the teenage Sinema writes, “yet we have within ourselves an often unrecognized, highly useful minority — the gifted.” A couple years earlier, at 16, she had graduated from high school as co-valedictorian. That is, she was gifted.

In the past year, practically every national media outlet in America has dedicated thousands of words to grapple with what, exactly, motivates Kyrsten Sinema. The New Yorker asked, “What does Kyrsten Sinema really want?” CNN had a nearly identical question on its mind: “Unsolved mystery: What does Kyrsten Sinema want?” Even “Saturday Night Live” got in on the action, with Cecily Strong donning a bright red dress, blue pearls and thick glasses to ask, “What do I want from this bill? I’ll never tell. Because I didn’t come to Congress to make friends — and so far, mission accomplished.” READ MORE

'Empire of Light'

In brief

". . .The film is a coming-of-age story universal in its consideration of the charged and formative encounters of youth. It’s a gentle encouragement out of the resigned slump of middle age. And it’s a drama about the nasty resurgence of racist nationalism that gripped England at the dawn of Thatcher’s era, and has now surged once again. But those themes don’t overwhelm the soft-spoken thing that Mendes and his actors have built. Empire of Light finds a careful balance—it listens to its characters rather than shouting a message over them.

Also important for a Sam Mendes movie, Empire of Light’s exquisite aesthetics don’t vainly upstage the story. The film looks incredible, with sumptuous cinematography by Roger Deakins and richly textured production design by Mark Tildesley. Those visual graces support and enhance the story rather than drown

EMPIRE OF LIGHT | Official Teaser Trailer | Searchlight Pictures - YouTube

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Duration: 1:14
Posted: Aug 24, 2022

Empire of Light | Searchlight Pictures

www.searchlightpictures.com › empire-o...

Set in an English coastal town in the early 1980s, EMPIRE OF LIGHT is a compelling and poignant drama about the power of human connection during turbulent ...

Sam Mendes introduces Empire of Light | BFI London Film Festival 2022 - YouTube

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Duration: 3:39
Posted: Oct 13, 2022

"After all the annihilation of his war film, 1917, director Sam Mendes has traveled forward in time, to the troubled early 1980s in England, to tell a humble little tale of human connection. His new film, Empire of Light, is the director’s most delicate, a wistful short story about two people seized by circumstance who help one another find their way through life. It’s an achingly lovely film—the best Mendes has yet made.

Olivia Colman plays Hilary, a retiring singleton who works at a seaside movie palace in small-town coastal England. 1980 is drawing to a close, and a Christmas melancholy fills the air. We watch as Hilary goes about her lonely life, dinners for one and the occasional utilitarian tryst with her married boss, Mr. Ellis (Colin Firth). Something is stirring, though, all of this stasis seeming pregnant with anticipation. That feeling is beautifully rendered in the film’s score, moody dots of piano and ambient hum—the sound of the planet in motion—composed by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.

That quiet excitement and nervousness is answered, in part, by the arrival of a new theater employee, Stephen (Michael Ward), a young man spinning his wheels until he gets into college. Hilary is instantly beguiled. He radiates kindness that wins over the whole staff, but Hilary senses something particularly kindred in him. Both she and Stephen are isolated in this picturesque but chilly town: he because he is Black in a bigoted country, she because of her struggles with mental health, which are gradually revealed as Hilary and Stephen fall into a tenuous romance.

One tenses up when it seems that Empire of Light is headed into the smarmy, didactic territory of a lesson movie. We expect some creaky panacea about race relations, and some stale, issue-of-the-week lecturing about mental health. But Mendes, who wrote the script, skirts hoary cliche (and worse) by staying close to Stephen and Hilary, these portraits of people in flux so finely wrought by Colman and Ward.

Sure, Empire of Light has more than just this one relationship on its mind. The film is a coming-of-age story universal in its consideration of the charged and formative encounters of youth. It’s a gentle encouragement out of the resigned slump of middle age. And it’s a drama about the nasty resurgence of racist nationalism that gripped England at the dawn of Thatcher’s era, and has now surged once again. But those themes don’t overwhelm the soft-spoken thing that Mendes and his actors have built. Empire of Light finds a careful balance—it listens to its characters rather than shouting a message over them.

I’m curious where this film came from. After a festival season of big-director memoir pieces, one does wonder if some personal narrative is being retold here. The film doesn’t gesture toward its creator in any easily discernible way, though, so I suppose we should take it on its stated terms. Whatever Mendes’s connection to the material, he’s made something humane and nourishing, a picture of rare thoughtfulness and decency. Viewed from some angles, the film looks rather strange: as Hilary loses her grip on her well being, Empire of Light takes on surprising new dimensions. It’s a shock to see the movie break its dreamy spell, as Colman suddenly turns the volume of her performance way up. Mendes’s calm and steady film stays upright throughout these jarring thrashes—and as Stephen is violently thrashed at—building toward a conclusion of staggering poignance.

Empire of Light’s overarching sentiment is hopeful, but not blinkered. Stephen is heading off into an uncertain future, burdened by other people’s prejudice as he tries to stretch into the fullness of himself. Mendes offers no balm for that, but at least gives Stephen these valuable moments of communion with troubled, yearning Hilary. In that, these characters escape the miserablism of so much prestige cinema. They’re given simple and profound pleasures to both ease and complicate their pain. Empire of Light could be unfairly read as maudlin (and already has been during its festival run), and it does indeed come close to that line. But Mendes restrains the film before its high feeling—its fugues of poetry, its watery smiles in the face of such sadness—becomes cloying.

What remains is a deep and refreshingly heart-on-its-sleeve compassion, a humbled and awed appreciation for the majesty of learning from another person. In the film, Hilary shows Stephen the theater’s abandoned third floor, once a grand ballroom full of noise and activity now gone silent and used only by pigeons. Seeing this ghostly room, one assumes that, later on in the film, it will be somehow revived. But Mendes lets it stay lost, an emblem of irretrievable time. Still, Hilary and Stephen make it their own for a while, a secret place where anything seems possible as their lives so fleetingly intersect. And then, just past them: the windows, the beach, the sea, the world entire—briefly theirs."

Sam Mendes' 'Empire of Light' review

Review | 'Empire of Light' celebrates the power of film to heal lost souls

The Washington Post · 1 day ago

‘Empire of Light’ Review: They Found It at the Movies

The New York Times · 18 hours ago

Sam Mendes Based ‘Empire of Light’ on His Mother’s Mental Health Issues. Showing Her the Film Was a ‘Big Moment’

Variety · 5 hours ago

Review: Sam Mendes bombs with ‘Empire of Light’ and takes Olivia Colman with him

SF Chronicle Datebook · 2 days ago

Also in the news

Box Office Preview Video: ‘Em,pire Of Light’, ‘Del Toro’s Pinocchio’ – Take Two

Deadline · 9 hours ago

Olivia Colman Praises Timothée Chalamet’s ‘Magical’ Willy Wonka Performance: ‘It’s Such a Treat’

Variety · 2 days ago

Empire of Light Review

IGN · 3 weeks ago

Thursday, December 08, 2022

Say Again Why Andy Biggs is Running for GOP House Speaker

"... While the establishment is behind him, a not-insignificant faction of the Republican Party certainly is not. It’s not the first time the more conservative wing has threatened to keep him from the gavel. Yet whatever scuttlebut there may be about choosing someone else for the job—Andy Biggs from Arizona is launching a heartening, if improbable, challenge—it’s looking increasingly less likely that the majority of House Republicans can rally behind anyone but the lukewarm representative from California. . ."

Politics

The end of the vaccine mandate comes at a convenient moment for weak Republicans in the U.S. House.

House Minority Leader McCarthy Briefs Press In Weekly News Conference

(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Kevin McCarthy is eyeing the laurels. Congress will end the military’s vaccine mandate, and his role as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives will be secured.

The move to stop the Department of Defense from mandating the Covid-19 vaccine for all service members is indeed a victory. But after more than a year of constituents and service men and women pestering their congressional representatives about the issue, only to be largely ignored, the timing seems suspect, to say the least. House Republicans as a group stayed silent until a few short weeks ago, when midterm elections and leadership decisions were once again on the line. Out of nowhere, the voices crying in the wilderness were at last heard, and the Grand Ol’ Party was suddenly outraged that the military would remove talented service members over a shot. As usual, they look likely to come through hot water unscalded, simply by waiting until temperatures were tepid.

The agreement to end the vaccine mandate will be tied up with the annual National Defense Authorization Act, one of the two major appropriations bills set to be passed before the end of the year. If the bill as it stands is passed—and it is expected to, as both parties have approved it in negotiations—the Department of Defense would no longer be permitted to require Covid-19 vaccination as a condition for entry or continued service in the United States military.

In addition to serving as a rallying point for lackluster Republicans, the decision is also made with one eye firmly on plummeting recruitment rates in the military over the past several years. The Army in particular has made headlines for lowering recruitment goals and still coming up 10,000 soldiers short. The end of the vaccine mandate would not, however, reinstate those members, roughly 3,400 as of April, who were removed from the service on account of not taking the shot. . ." READ MORE

December 08, 2022 9:09 PM ET

"Republican Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona called for Republicans to drop Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California as the party’s nominee for speaker of the House Thursday.

“We need to make a change in trajectory, a change of path, a change in process, a change of procedure, a change in policy,” Biggs told “America Reports” host John Roberts. “All of those are not going to happen with the current leadership — leader at the top, and he’s had 12 years when at or near the apex of Republican leadership, it’s time to make a change. And if we make those changes, I think we’ll get a better process, which will lead to better policy for the American people.” (RELATED: ‘Couldn’t Lead In The Minority’: GOP Rep. Blasts McCarthy’s Speaker Bid)

Biggs launched an unsuccessful challenge to McCarthy for the nomination of the House Republican caucus to serve as Speaker of the House, losing by a 188-31 vote on Nov. 15. Biggs announced he would still run for the post in spite of McCarthy being the Republican nominee.

WATCH:

“I’m hearing from people who I had not heard from literally for months and months and months who have come up to me and said I think you are right, we need a change, and we need to change the direction,” Biggs said.

McCarthy needs 218 votes to become speaker of the House. At least five Republicans have said they will not back McCarthy for speaker, according to Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, enough to deny McCarthy the speakership.

“We are not in complete disarray,” Biggs said after Roberts played a clip of several Democratic representatives claiming the Republican Party was in trouble. “Republicans, whether it’s on the more liberal end of the spectrum or more conservative end of the spectrum, we agree on many, many policy issues.”

Republican Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska threatened to work with Democrats to elect “a moderate alternative” as speaker, according to the Omaha World-Herald.

McCarthy did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation."

Rep. Scott Perry and other Freedom Caucus members at a press conference outside the Capitol.

Freedom Caucus Chair Scott Perry. Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images.

A group of seven current and incoming right-wing House Republicans who have not yet taken public positions on House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy's (R-Calif.) bid for speaker on Thursday released a list of demands for GOP leadership.

Why it matters: The list includes at least one item that's likely to be a red line for the Republican leader, which could throw his already murky path to the speaker’s gavel into even greater doubt with less than a month to go until the election.

Driving the news: The seven Republicans wrote in a letter obtained by Axios that House leadership "has increasingly centralized decision-making power around fewer and fewer individuals," demanding concessions on policy, procedure and right-wing representation.

The first demand listed: making it easier to force a vote on motions to vacate the chair – or dislodge the speaker — a disruptive and potentially destabilizing power McCarthy is reluctant to cede.
Another is for leadership to refrain from spending to tip the scales in Republican House primaries, another monumental ask for McCarthy.

What caught our eye: The letter is led by Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), the House Freedom Caucus chair, who has repeatedly demurred on his position on McCarthy's speaker bid since the Californian was nominated last month.

He told Axios on Thursday he is "clearly" still undecided, saying of giveaways McCarthy has already made to conservatives on GOP conference rules: "We've got to go much further than rules, but we’re happy to have a conversation.”
Another is Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) who has only gone so far as to tell Axios on Friday, "No one in this town has 218 [votes] … Things are going to have to change between now and Jan. 3."
Also on the list are two incoming freshmen: Reps-elect Andy Ogles of Tennessee and Eli Crane of Arizona, both prospective Freedom Caucus members.

What they're saying: One of the signers, Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.), said in a statement McCarthy is "a friend" and that they have a "good working relationship."

"While I continue my consideration of who I will vote for, the items presented are simply what I expect and require for anyone seeking the responsibility of serving as Speaker."

By the numbers: McCarthy is on track for a 10-seat majority by the time the new Congress is sworn in, and five House Republicans have publicly said they won’t vote for him, severely imperiling his bid.

Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) announced on Wednesday he is challenging McCarthy, though his bid is more a ploy to pull votes from McCarthy than get elected speaker himself.
"I don't know anyone that’s predicting anyone that’s predicting Andy Biggs will get 218,” said Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.), Biggs' anti-McCarthy co-conspirator. “What Andy is courageously doing is opening that door for us to help us deny Kevin the majority.”
Another McCarthy foe, Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), asked if he would vote for Biggs, told Axios, "We're all debating. We've got, what, 23 days? … We’ll see."