(MON 7/18/22)

Sanders takes on Manchin … Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) is “intentionally sabotaging the president’s agenda, what the American people want, what the majority of us in the Democratic caucus want,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT)(pictured), told Martha Raddatz on ABC News’ This Week Sunday. “Nothing new about that.”

Indeed, Manchin, with his fellow centrist/center-right Democratic colleague, Krysten Sinema, of Arizona, put the White House and their party’s Senate leadership through the legislative wringer last year, just to get $1.2-trillion in spending passed in the bipartisan infrastructure bill before fully torpedoing President Biden’s Build Back Better social infrastructure proposal in the fall. All this came about after a last-minute Democratic win by Georgia’s two run-off candidates gave the party the vice president-tiebreaker majority on January 4, 2021. 

“And the problem is we continue to talk about Manchin like he was serious,” Sanders continued. “He was not.”

The Vermont senator also criticized Biden himself for his just-concluded trip to Israel and Saudi Arabia, where the big takeaway was the president’s fist-bump greeting with Saudi Arabia Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. 

Biden says he raised the issue of Riyadh’s dismal human rights record, including the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. U.S. intelligence investigations have pinned Khashoggi’s brutal killing on bin Salman, which the crown prince has repeatedly denied. Biden came away from his meeting with nine Arab leaders last weekend not with a deal for lower oil prices but with a commitment to the nations to counter Chinese, Russian and Iranian influence in the region, The New York Times reports. 

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‘Multiple systemic failures’ … That’s the initial assessment of the bi-partisan three-member Texas House Investigative Committee on the Uvalde Shooting. More than 375 law enforcement officers from various federal, state and local agencies waited for more than an hour to take down the shooter in the Robb Elementary attack, in which 19 fourth graders and two teachers were killed.

“There was a lack of overall effective command that day,” said committee chairman Dustin Burrows, Republican state House member from Lubbock, in the panel’s first public press conference Sunday. 

“That day, several officers in that hallway (at Robb Elementary) knew or should’ve known there was active shooting,” Burrows said. “They should have done more.”

Burrows, state Rep. Joe Moody (D-El Paso) and Eva Guzman, a former judge and the non-partisan member of the committee, began investigating the mass shooting 44 days ago. Guzman said one mistake already identified is the lack of a commanding officer to organize the response. The committee, going forward, will study which of the officers present were trained to understand that the shooter was active for as much as an hour after they arrived before they could put a stop to the shooting.

--Todd Lassa