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nikki haley
'Turning Into the Super PAC Election': Outside Spending Tops $1 Billion for 2024
"Outside group spending this year is almost double the rate of any prior year," noted one critic. "Not a good thing."
Aug 16, 2024
Empowered by the U.S. Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling allowing unlimited independent financial contributions to support political campaigns, outside spending during the current election cycle has hit a record $1 billion, according to a report published Thursday by the watchdog group OpenSecrets.
"Super PACs and other outside groups that can raise and spend unlimited sums of money have poured about $1.1 billion into 2024 federal elections as of August 15—nearly twice what similar groups spent over the same period in the 2020 presidential election cycle when independent expenditures hit an all-time record," OpenSecrets said.
"More than half of all outside spending during the 2024 cycle—about $585.8 million—has gone into the presidential election, which saw an especially expensive Republican presidential nominating contest," the group added.
"The largest spender, by far, is former President Donald Trump's flagship super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc.," the report notes. "To date, MAGA Inc. has spent about $125.1 million boosting Trump in the presidential election, including nearly $33.2 million attacking his GOP rivals and more than $65.6 million opposing President Joe Biden."
"Future Forward and American Bridge 21st Century, the first and second-largest Democratic hybrid PACs, have spent a combined $74.7 million on the presidential race as of August 15," the publication adds. "Both super PACs pivoted to supporting Vice President Kamala Harris after Biden suspended his campaign last month."
Other key findings in the report include:
- Americans for Prosperity (AFP) Action, a super PAC at the center of a network of conservative donors and activists led by billionaire Charles Koch, spent more than $31.2 million supporting former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley's failed GOP presidential run;
- After Haley's loss, AFP Action pivoted to congressional races, spending nearly $28 million on Republican candidates;
- The pro-cryptocurrency super PAC Fairshake and affiliated groups spent nearly $46 million in the 2024 electoral cycle, more than any other industry-affiliated organization; and
- United Democracy Project, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's super PAC, has spent more than $35 million on congressional races, most of it toward efforts to oust progressive lawmakers the group deems insufficiently supportive of Israel.
AIPAC—which vowed to spend $100 million on 2024 elections—played a key role in defeating Democratic Reps. Jamaal Bowman (N.Y.) and Cori Bush (Mo.) in recent primaries. The group has come under fire for attacking Black and brown members of Congress and for supporting Republicans who took part in Trump's attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.
In an effort to curb the flood of dark money and other outside spending, House Democrats led by Reps. Adam Schiff (Calif.), Pramila Jayapal (Wash.), Dean Phillips (Minn.), and Jim McGovern (Mass.) last year
proposed a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United.
" Citizens United was one of the most egregious enablers of special interest money, but it was only the latest in a long line of Supreme Court cases that opened the floodgates," Schiff's office said at the time. "To truly rein in dark money, we must amend our Constitution."
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Baby Ahmad Was Beheaded by Israel, With a US Bomb
On Sunday night, May 26, Ahmad became the symbol of the unspeakable horror of genocide in Gaza after Israel bombed his family tent in north Rafah.
Jun 06, 2024
Ahmad Al-Najjar was a happy one-year old child from Gaza. He loved trampolines, balls, and cats. Born as the youngest of his four siblings, his father liked to call him “bobba” or “baby.”
On Sunday night, May 26, Ahmad became the symbol of the unspeakable horror of genocide in Gaza after Israel bombed his family tent in north Rafah, killing him along with his mother, Faten, his sister, Houda, and his brother, Arkan. Though he was bombed beyond recognition, Ahmad was the most recognizable victim of the tents massacre in Rafah, which burned alive, beheaded, and killed at least 45 Palestinians, most of them women and children, and wounded hundreds others.
Rafah’s tents massacre was one of the most heinous assaults on Palestinian civilians in recent memory. International media and Palestinian sources reported that Israel blitzed the camp where displaced Palestinians were sheltering in tents with seven massive U.S. bombs weighing 2,000 pounds each. Meanwhile, weapons experts toldCNN and The New York Times that they identified the remains of Boeing-made GBU-39s in the rubble.
The bombarded refugee tents had been designated by Israel as a “safe area” for civilians. Rafah was described by UNICEF officials as “a city of children, who have nowhere safe to go in Gaza.” It was believed to be Gaza’s last refuge, and the limit of the Biden administration’s “red line” in Gaza. This grim reality, however, did not prevent the Biden administration from shipping thousands of bombs and weapons to Israel, despite Israel’s repeated threats to invade Rafah. As Israeli forces were pounding Rafah’s refugee camps, U.S. presidential candidate Nikki Haley was in Israel signing “finish them” on the very U.S. bombs that were used to slaughter children in Gaza.
It is the children of Gaza who are forced to live the most unspeakable horrors while being denied the same outrage that Israel’s invented horrors have generated among U.S. and Western politicians
Widely circulated footage from the massacre showed a night of unspeakable horror: bodies burned to ashes, charred and blackened beyond recognition; beheaded children, decapitated and ripped apart by U.S. bombs; parents clutching their dead and burned children, screaming in horror; rescuers pulling people’s charred remains from the burning tents; wounded victims transferred to the hospital with horrific and gruesome injuries.
But the most horrifying footage from that night showed a man holding up what appeared to be the body of a small child who had been beheaded. It belonged to Baby Ahmad, who was wearing black pants and an orange shirt that night. His left leg was also severed in the blast. The family never found Ahmad’s head, and they buried him without it. He was put in the same body bag with his sister Houda. His mother and brother Arkan were buried in separate body bags.
His surviving brothers, Muhammad and Yamin, both saw the ravaged body of their little brother that night. In an interview with Al Jazeera, Ahmad’s father, Abdel Hafez, and two brothers, the only survivors of the family, speak up about the unspeakable horror they had to endure that night.
“I did not believed he was beheaded in the bombing until I saw it with my own eyes at the Tal As-Sultan clinic,” says Abdel Hafez. “His head was separated from his body.”
“It was horrific, very horrific, seeing a beheaded baby, my baby. He was buried without a head,” says the father. “I have been in a state of utter collapse, until this moment.”
The brothers look visibly traumatized. They can hardly invoke the sight of their little brother without trembling and bursting into tears. The family was staying at one of UNRWA’s shelters when Israeli forces pounded the camp. They had been displaced several times before they finally reached Rafah, where they settled in the Tal As-Sultan neighborhood after being forced to flee Khan Younis.
Battling his tears, brother Mohammad, aged 13, relates: “We were playing ball, before sunset. I came back to the shelters. They (Israelis) bombed the shelters, and I heard screams. Then I saw my brother Ahmad at the shelter’s door. His head was severed. His left leg was severed. He was wearing black pants and an orange shirt. I could not bear it, seeing my brother beheaded.”
Speaking through tears, Ahmad’s other brother, Yamin, aged eight, relates his first sight of Ahmad following the Israeli airstrike: “His face was soaked in blood, and his head severed. I wept. I love them so much.”
Standing by the graves of his family, and sharing photos of his slain children in their better and happier days, Ahmad’s father shares his fondest and last memory of his son: his nicknames, “bobba” and “baby,” and his baby word for “give me potato,” which is “baba tata,” and the way he pronounced shekel, the Israeli currency. “The last thing he asked for was a shekel, using his baby word for it: ‘tetel.’ I gave him the shekel, and he hugged me, and then left to buy something with it.”
“He loved playing with cats,” Muhammad recalls, bursting into bitter tears. “When I see his things, the trampoline and ball, and the things he played with, I feel sad and I miss him. I miss them all. I pray for them. I pray that God will have mercy on them, and grant them Heaven.”
Ahmad was one of 15,000 Gazan children murdered by Israel since October 7, a toll that would have been unimaginable without the bottomless supply of U.S. bombs. A new report by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor shows that Israel dropped over 70,000 tons of U.S. bombs on Gaza in 200 days, which surpasses that of WWII and the bombings in Dresden, Hamburg, and London combined. It’s also 20 times more than the U.S. dropped on Iraq in six years of war.
Israel launched its genocidal war on Gaza by inventing its most outrageous lie, that Hamas fighters beheaded 40 Israeli babies on October 7. Despite being widely debunked, the lie has been repeatedly invoked by Israeli leaders to justify their genocide in Gaza. It has also served as a way to justify U.S. complicity in Israel’s war crimes in Gaza, with top U.S. officials, including Joe Biden, along with the mainstream media, echoing it recklessly.
Meanwhile, it is the children of Gaza who are forced to live the most unspeakable horrors while being denied the same outrage that Israel’s invented horrors have generated among U.S. and Western politicians. To cite Ahmad’s father: “They accuse us of beheading babies. But whose head was decapitated? My son, my one-and-a-half year old baby! They severed it completely.”
Update: This piece has been edited to provide more sourcing and accounts as to the types of U.S.-made bombs that Israel dropped on Rafah on May 26, 2024.
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'Just Disgusting': Nikki Haley Writes 'Finish Them' on Israeli Bomb
"Biden provided the shells, Republicans autograph them," said one progressive leader. "The U.S. political class is united in its complicity with this genocide."
May 28, 2024
Humanitarians reacted with outrage on Tuesday after former presidential U.S. candidate Nikki Haley wrote and signed an arguably genocidal message on an Israeli artillery shell while visiting an Israel Defense Forces post.
"Finish them! America [loves] Israel always," Haley wrote on the shell Tuesday, signing her name. She was accompanied by Danny Danon, a member of the Knesset, Israel's parliament, who posted photos from their tour on social media. Haley, who was the ambassador to the United Nations under then-President Donald Trump, has been an ardent supporter of Israel's war in Gaza and has ties to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a pro-Israel lobby group.
"Nothing to see here, just AIPAC's favorite politician, Nikki Haley, celebrating death and destruction in Gaza with an autographed missile," IfNotNow, a U.S. Jewish group that supports Palestinian rights, wrote on social media.
"Just disgusting," wrote Alon-Lee Green, director of the Jewish-Arab Movement for Peace, Equality & Social Justice in Israel. In the post, Green pleaded with Americans to take back their "filthy death-promoting politicians."
Alec Karakatsanis, an American civil rights lawyer, wrote that the Haley's message was "one of the most depraved things I have ever seen."
The timing of Haley's autograph of the weapon of war heightened the outrage. On Sunday night, Israel bombed the tents of displaced Palestinians in a "safe zone" of Rafah, killing at least 45 civilians, mostly women and children. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the strike a "tragic mistake," but the Israeli military then killed at least another 21 Palestinian civilians in a similar attack on a refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip on Tuesday.
Haley "spent Memorial Day not commemorating fallen American service members, but visiting Israel as it conducts a brutal massacre in Gaza," The New Republic's Hafiz Rashid reported, calling her autographed message "sick."
One commentator suggested that Haley's act encapsulated the attitude of America's leaders. The most powerful members of both major parties, including President Joe Biden, a Democrat, have supported Israel's war in spite of condemnation by the United Nations General Assembly, the International Criminal Court, and the International Court of Justice, which ordered Israel to "immediately halt its military offensive" in Rafah.
"Biden provided the shells, Republicans autograph them," Yanis Varoufakis, former Greek minister of finance and pro-Palestine public intellectual, wrote on social media. "The U.S. political class is united in its complicity with this genocide."
Nikki Hailey in Israel scribbling "FINISH THEM"on the shells that the IDF is about to fire into Rafah in defiance of the International Court of Justice. Biden provided the shells, Republicans autograph them. The US political class is united in its complicity with this genocide. pic.twitter.com/hejqVAjq8M
— Yanis Varoufakis (@yanisvaroufakis) May 28, 2024
Haley has spent recent days in Israel making unfounded claims about Russian, Chinese, and Iranian connections to the October 7 attack led by Hamas—and voicing her full support for the war effort, using rhetoric that wrongly indicates that she speaks for all Americans.
"America stands by Israel," Haley said during her tour with Danon, according toi24 News. "Israel is fighting the enemies of the U.S. today. Don't stop until you win."
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