Raw Story

Two dozen Democratic governors met Wednesday and emerged from the meeting unified behind President Joe Biden and his campaign, despite questions over his age and cognitive health following his fumbling debate performance.

Speaking with reporters, Gov. Tim Walz, chair of the Democratic Governors Association, gave a clear message.

"He has had our backs through COVID, through all of the recovery, all that has happened. The governors have his back and we're working together just to make very, very clear on that," he said. "A path to victory in November is the number one priority and that's the number one priority of the president."

Walz called the private meeting with Biden honest and open, and said they provided good feedback.

Gov. Wes Moore echoed Walz's comments and said the conversation felt candid.

"When you love someone, you tell them the truth," he said, noting they were honest with their feedback and concerns they've heard.

The president, Moore said, is "all-in."

"The thing that makes us most optimistic and most hopeful, is not necessarily that we're afraid of an alternative, but also is that we're hopeful for the future," he said.

Read also: Biden denies report he will 'discuss the future of his re-election campaign with family'

The governors united and pledged their support to Biden as they have a common cause — defeating former President Donald Trump.

Reporters then started shouting questions, including: "Do you feel he's fit for office?"

"Yes, he's fit for office," said Walz. The president has 3 1/2 years of delivering for us, going through what we've all been through. None of us are denying Thursday night was a bad performance. It was a bad hit, if you will on that. But it doesn't impact what I believe: he's delivering."

Answering more shouted questions, Moore reiterated the president is the nominee, the party leader, and that he's in the race to win.

The conference comes after some in the Democratic party have openly questioned whether the president ought to remain in the race.

Former President Barack Obama has publicly backed his ex-vice president even after a "bad debate" night, but behind closed doors, Obama has reportedly expressed concerns that Biden may have hurt his chances of winning re-election.

Watch the clip below or at this link right here.

Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, the far-right figure at the helm of the "Project 2025" plan to reshape the entire federal government for the benefit of Republicans, was raked over the coals on Wednesday by MSNBC anchor Joy Reid and civil rights professor Sherrilyn Ifill.

"Should Donald Trump be re-elected and elected king, God help us all, he will be surrounded by people like this guy, the head of the Heritage Foundation, the folks behind Project 2025, who said the quiet part real loud and televised." She played a clip of Roberts speaking on the far-right Real America's Voice network.

"We are going to win," he said in the clip. "We're in the process of taking this country back. We're in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be."

ALSO READ: How The Onion’s founding editor finds humor in the dismal age of Trump

"When I heard that clip of that guy ... essentially issue a violent threat against Americans, I had two thoughts. Thought one, he's not going to do anything violent," said Reid. "He'll be at a country club somewhere golfing, while the real violent people, the other people, the Proud Boys types do the actual dirty work. So that man is a coward, and he likes to talk a lot of crap, but it is still a threat. And I took it as a declaration of war. How did you take it?"

"Well, the gloves are obviously off, and they are no longer afraid to say what their true intentions are," said Ifill. "What it made me was angry in a very particular kind of way. I'm not sure who these people think they are, but the idea of some second American Revolution — they are the Confederacy. They don't get the title of American Revolution, they're the Confederacy bent on destroying this country. If they think that what we have gone through, certainly as Black people in this country, as women, as gay people, as the disabled, as people who are poor trying to find their way up to make their children's lives better than theirs, if they think we are about to throw that all off and knuckle under to the likes of Stephen Miller and this man, and Donald Trump, they have got to be kidding."

"I am also from Queens," added Ifill, referencing Trump's birthplace. "I can tell you, the Donald Trumps of the world, we understood exactly who they were when I was growing up in Queens. No matter how much money he had, he was not fit, not worthy of the love and attention that these people have lavished on him. We will not go back."

Watch the video below or at the link right here.

Joy Reid and Sherrilyn Ifill discuss Project 2025 threats www.youtube.com

Donald Trump ally Michael Flynn shot down social media claims he'd been chosen as the former president's vice presidential running mate Wednesday.

A Federal Election Commission filing was shared on Twitter appearing to show Flynn's name added to a Donald Trump fundraising group — with the title "Vice President" accompanying it.

Flynn fired back almost immediately on his X account calling it fake.

"I just saw 2 unauthorized FEC filings referencing my name. They are fake news! I don't know anything about them, and my office has alerted the FEC," he said.

The post comes after Flynn issued an official statement of endorsement for Trump's 2024 campaign.

READ ALSO: 'Fraud': Trump campaign denies federal filing naming Michael Flynn as VP running mate

Last week, Raw Story's Jordan Green reported that a number of fake committees filed documents that inadvertently make false announcements.

"In late 2022, for example, someone created a federal political committee indicating that former Vice President Mike Pence had formed a 2024 presidential campaign committee," recalled Green. "But the committee was a fraud, and Pence's representatives scrambled to correct the record and debunk several premature media reports that Pence, who ultimately would run for president months later, had entered the race."

When a similar Trump-Flynn filing first popped up in June, the Trump campaign debunked it after Raw Story asked about it.

The committee, “Donald J. Trump and Michael Flynn for President 2024 Inc.,” is bogus, the Trump campaign confirmed to Raw Story.

Last week, Flynn himself responded to Raw Story's reporting by indicating he is not in contention to become Trump's vice presidential running mate.

Faced with mounting calls from within his own party to bow out and allow Vice President Kamala Harris to head up the ticket, President Joe Biden so far doesn't appear to be planning for an exit — and there's an important reason for that, wrote University of Pennsylvania psychologist Adam Grant for The New York Times.

Specifically, he wrote, Biden faces a psychological phenomenon known as "escalation of commitment to a losing course of action," or the idea that one tends to prefer doubling down because "it feels better to be a fighter than a quitter."

"One of the tragedies of the human condition is that we use our big brains not to make rational decisions, but rather to rationalize the decisions we’ve already made," wrote Grant — and this goes beyond politicians simply refusing to give up in the face of dimming odds. "We stick around too long in dead-end jobs. We stay in unhappy marriages even after friends have counseled us to leave. We stand by candidates even after they violate our principles."

ALSO READ: How The Onion’s founding editor finds humor in the dismal age of Trump

Past presidents have stuck to failing policies out of this very fear — including the Vietnam War and the Iraq War, he noted. "It happens in business, too: Blockbuster went bust because instead of buying Netflix, leaders escalated their commitment to renting physical videos. Kodak made the same mistake by doubling down on selling film instead of pivoting to digital cameras."

Escalation of commitment is made stronger, Grant explained, when someone feels emotionally attached to the plan, when the end is drawing near, and when there is still some semblance of a path to victory — all of which is true in Biden's case. Which makes it all the more difficult for him to change course — further compounded by the fear many of his own staffers have to speak their mind.

"What Mr. Biden needs is not a support network but a challenge network — people who have the will to put the country’s interests ahead of his and the skill to coldly assess his chances," Grant concluded. "That’s a task for someone who is not affiliated with the campaign in any way, someone whose judgment has proved to be impeccable and most of all, impartial, and someone who is not worried about the possible cost to their own career."

It may be time, he added, for Biden to recognize that "service is not only about stepping up to lead. It’s also about having the courage to step aside."

Republicans are not the victors of a tumultuous campaign week that saw President Joe Biden flub his first debate and former President Donald Trump win a landmark Supreme Court ruling — the oligarchy is, a new analysis contends.

Slate writers Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern presented an alternative Wednesday to the predominant political narrative that Biden’s campaign is nosediving while a newly disciplined Trump reaps the benefit.

Rather than look at the face of the political parties, they raise the specter of Supreme Court rulings they say demonstrate a cataclysmic governmental shift.

“Make no mistake about it,” the pair write, “When a court that has been battered by near-weekly reports of undisclosed oligarch-funded vacations (and gifts and super yachts and tricked out RVs and secret conferences with high-paying Koch supporters getting access to justices) decides to make it easier to bribe public officials—as it did in Snyder v. U.S.—that’s a very public signal that the conservative supermajority does not care what you think.”

The Slate editorial shifts its gaze away from red versus blue and toward the growing powers they say the nation’s political elite managed to wrestle away from the federal government.

ALSO READ: Fact-checker buries celebration of 'disciplined' Trump by using barrage of furious posts

The Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision was only one of many rulings they argue dismantle checks and balances and channel power toward a strengthening epicenter of government.

“The Supreme Court’s Republican appointees are sympathetic to wealthy individuals and corporations, so they will contort the law to help them,” write Lithwick and Stern.

“The court has placed itself at the apex of the state, agreeing to share power only with a strongman president who seeks to govern in line with the conservative justices’ vision.”

The pair argue the federal checks dismantled in three under-the-radar rulings made in the past week — one obliterating a statute of limitations on government regulation challenges and another a mandate that courts rely on agency know-how — imperil basic necessities of daily American life.

“That is how American government has functioned for well over a century, to the great benefit of the citizenry,” write Lithwick and Stern.

”It’s why there is clean air and drinkable, water and airplanes that stay in the sky and drugs that don’t kill us.”

Unfortunately, while the pair present their readers with a specific vision of an imminent catastrophic future, they don’t have specifics on what an actionable solution might entail.

“Public outrage has somehow made the court more reckless,” the Slate writers conclude. “The time for wishful thinking about the power of shame, institutional legitimacy, and historical legacy is over. The time for action may well be now or never.”

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell's name appears on new subpoenas in former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani's bankruptcy case, court records show.

Giuliani's deal with Lindell's streaming site and app FrankSpeech — which the legal news site Law&Crime reports could net $180,000 in extra income — and both men's coffee ventures are at the heart of the documents demanded by the former mayor's creditors, Manhattan bankruptcy court records show.

The demands come from Official Committee of Unsecured Creditors lawyers representing Georgia election worker Shaye Moss, Dominion Voting Systems, and Noelle Dunphy, who has accused Giuliani of wage theft and sexual harassment, according to court records and Law&Crime.

ALSO READ: ‘They could have killed me’: Spycraft, ballots and a Trumped-up plot gone haywire

The creditors seek “All Documents and Communications regarding and relationship between [Lindell] or My Coffee, on one hand, and Rudy Coffee, on the other hand.”

Creditors have recently claimed that Giuliani could be fraudulently “funneling funds that belong to his creditors to his business" which they dubbed "a personal piggy bank," Law&Crime reports.

During a June 17 hearing, Giuliani and his attorneys denied any impropriety and had what Law&Crime dubbed an "awkward exchange" with U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Sean Lane.

ALSO READ: EXCLUSIVE: House Republicans subpoena ex-Capitol Police intel head for Jan. 6 inquiry

"You have to provide information” Lane told Giuliani's lawyer Gary Fischoff. “It can’t be on a trust me basis."

When the lawyer admitted he did not yet know the financial details himself, Lane reportedly remarked, “That’s an unfortunate statement for you to have to make."