Rep. Luis Gutiérrez (D-IL) on Wednesday asked for the public’s help in identifying a man who berated members of his Illinois staff for several minutes, at one point telling one staffer that he would “beat your motherfucking ass, motherfucker.”

“After the man left, he came back in, passed through our lobby and threatened my staff some more with physical violence,” Gutiérrez wrote on Facebook. “Along with the objects he threw, this amounts to battery according the police report we filed.”

Gutiérrez also wrote that the man “identified himself as a precinct captain for Chicago City Councilman Reboyas.” The Chicago Tribune noted that Gutiérrez’s daughter, Jessica, is facing off against Reboyas for his seat next year. Reboyas denied that the man was his precinct captain to the Tribune and added: “I would never do anything like that. It’s not my style.”

Two senators are trying to sneak legislation that would impose criminal penalties on American companies and groups that support a boycott of Israel into a spending package that would avert a government shutdown by Friday.

Sen. Ben Cardin, a Maryland Democrat, and Sen. Rob Portman, an Ohio Republican, are pushing a proposal that would create criminal and civil penalties for American entities that back boycotts supporting Palestinian rights, The New York Times reported. The move seeks to weaken the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, known as BDS, that seeks to economically pressure Israel to give equal rights to Palestinians, similar to the South African anti-apartheid movement.

Cardin and Portman have pushed for the legislation for months and are now trying to attach it to a package of spending bills that Congress must pass to avoid a shutdown.

They said the bill is in response to a 2016 resolution by the United Nations Human Rights Council that sought to create a database with companies doing business in territories occupied by Israel in violation of international law.

While the original proposal called for jail time for violators, a revised proposal would use fines as penalties. The legislation was also amended to “explicitly state that none of the provisions shall infringe upon any First Amendment right.”

But the ACLU says the wording is non-binding and “leaves intact key provisions which would impose civil and criminal penalties on companies, small business owners, nonprofits and even people acting on their behalf who engage in or otherwise support certain political boycotts.”

Even the Anti-Defamation League, which has lobbied for the legislation, admitted in a leaked internal memo that anti-BDS laws are “ineffective, unworkable, unconstitutional and bad for the Jewish community,” The Forward reported.

Cardin’s fellow Democrats have voiced opposition to the legislation as well. Rep. Betsy McCollum, D-Minn., slammed lawmakers secretly working to “to slip language into a must-pass spending bill that criminalizes politically motivated boycotts against Israel.”

“The Israel Anti-Boycott Act violates our right to free speech,” she tweeted.

But even if this legislation is delayed or fails entirely, most Americans already live in a state where anyone doing business with the state is barred from supporting the BDS movement.

26 states, including New York, California and Texas, have legislation in place barring state contractors from supporting a boycott of Israel, while 13 other states have similar bills pending.

On Tuesday, the NAACP launched a weeklong boycott of Facebook in response to two congressionally commissioned reports that illustrate how Russian trolls on the platform not only targeted people of color, but made stoking racial tensions one of their top priorities.

“Facebook’s engagement with partisan firms, its targeting of political opponents, the spread of misinformation and the utilization of Facebook for propaganda promoting disingenuous portrayals of the African American community is reprehensible,” NAACP president and CEO Derrick Johnson said in a statement. The organization also announced Monday it had returned a recent donation from the company.

Amazon is seeking to build a global “brain” for the Pentagon called JEDI, a weapon of unprecedented surveillance and killing power, a profoundly aggressive weapon that should not be allowed to be created.

Amazon has built a vast, globally distributed data storage capacity and sophisticated artificial intelligence programs to propel its retail business that it hopes to use to win a $10 billion Pentagon contract to create the aforementioned “brain” that goes by the project name Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, a moniker obviously concocted to yield the Star Wars acronym — JEDI.

As of the October 12, 2018, deadline for submitting proposals for JEDI, Amazon is the betting favorite for the contract, which will go to just one bidder, in spite of protests by competitors, chief among them Microsoft and IBM. The Pentagon appears likely to select a winner for the contract in 2019.

Religion in American Politics is really White Evangelical vs. Not

We use language to describe religion in politics casting those who are religious in broad terms as opposed to those who are not religious. However, these exit polls help to shed light on why we need to be more specific. While it was true in both 2006 and 2018 that those who attend religious services weekly are far more likely to vote Republican than those who never attend religious services, the most notable divide is white evangelical Christians versus everyone else. White evangelical Christians made up nearly the same amount of the electorate in both elections (24% vs 26%), yet the demographic got even more conservative. In 2006, this group voted for Republicans 70-28, while in 2018 it voted for Republicans 75-22, an eleven point shift in margin. Meanwhile, the category of “not white evangelical” got even bluer, from 60-38 D in 2006 to 66-32 D in 2018. Put next to each other, it might be the most clear way to define the country: one quarter of the country votes for Republicans 75-25 while the remaining three quarters of the country votes for Democrats 66-34. That result is enough to produce a healthy Dem win, but even in good GOP years, there is still a huge divide between these two groups, which is simply fascinating. Put more plainly, it’s a divide that doesn’t get talked about enough and it dwarfs all other religious divides in American politics.

White people got more Republican, but there’s also less of them

Young people are now even more Democratic leaning than they were in 2006

The electorate was more liberal- but also more conservative

Your views on the (current) President increasingly determined your vote for President

A lot of people were willing to ignore a good economy to punish the President’s party

Education is now a defining divide in American politics

The gender gap was bigger

Conclusion

The 2018 Midterm revealed many of the faultlines that our current politics are going to be fought along in the years going forward. Any of these trends can be interpreted as important but if I had to single out two as most important, I’d likely go with education and partisanship. Education is rather obvious because it has huge implications for the political map: urban/suburban communities and educated states/jurisdictions are moving towards Democrats, while rural areas and states/jurisdictions with low levels of education are moving towards Republicans. That vicious partition has real consequences for the way parties act both moving forward but also in the present, like how Wisconsin State House Speaker Robin Vos (R) seemed to believe that Milwaukee and Madison are not legitimate or meaningful communities since they overwhelmingly vote for Democrats in a recent comment. That type of rhetoric is likely to be amplified in the coming years as these divides continue to cement themselves. As for partisanship, it helps to explain what we’re seeing in the Senate and the House and helps to set expectations moving forward. Most notably, the days of Senate elections like 2008, where Democrats easily won races in South Dakota, Louisiana, and Arkansas despite losing decisively in those states at the presidential level, are long gone. Finally, I want to note that the point about the economy has important ramifications for 2020 and is not good news for President Trump, but that is a post for another day. For now, I hope I provided interesting enough data and analysis and I will see you again soon.

On second thought…

Rudy Giuliani put his foot in his mouth this week when he told The Daily Beast that Michael Cohen’s crimes were, frankly, no big deal. “Nobody got killed, nobody got robbed… This was not a big crime,” he told the Beast in an interview on Wednesday.

On Friday, President Trump’s personal lawyer offered a “CORRECTION.”

CORRECTION: I didn’t say payments were not a big crime. I have said consistently that the Daniels and McDougall payments are not crimes and tweeted a great article yesterday making that point . If it isn’t a witch-hunt why are they pursuing a non-crime.

— Rudy Giuliani (@RudyGiuliani) December 14, 2018