I haven’t checked, but this may be the shortest Weekly Sift ever. Here’s why: Given how close and how consequential tomorrow’s election looks, it’s hard to think about anything else. And yet, it’s also hard to come up with anything worthwhile to say about it. I could try to predict who’s going to win, but you’d be foolish to believe me, because I don’t know. I could collect a lot of other people’s predictions, but they don’t know either.
We’re down to the point where you can vote, you can encourage your friends to vote, and you can do some election-day volunteering. Beyond that, you can watch the Future arrive at the usual rate of one second per second.
Back in 2008, I started doing election preview posts, predicting how the evening was likely to play out, given poll-closing times and what the opinion polls were saying. The 2008 preview was so accurate that I started thinking I knew something. (I said that California’s outcome would be projected almost immediately after polls closed at 11 EST, putting Obama over the top. That’s exactly what happened.) I got 2016 drastically wrong, but I didn’t learn my lesson and wrote a 2020 preview anyway.
This year has been an ongoing master class in the pointlessness of speculation. Pundits have talked and written endlessly about how the debates would go, whether Biden would or should drop out, what process the Democrats should use to replace him, whether Harris would do any better, who the two VP nominees should be, whether Trump’s endless gaffes would cost him, what the “October surprise” might be, how various voting blocs — women, Blacks, Hispanics, union members — would respond to Harris, and on and on.
If you ignored all of it, you are probably better off than the rest of us, or at least calmer. By tomorrow, we will all have voted, contributed, volunteered — or not. What has mattered is action, not divining the future.
Here’s what I will say: In a typical election, late-deciding voters mostly break the same way. So for better or worse, there’s a good chance we won’t have the kind of photo-finish the polls are predicting.
But as we all know by now, this isn’t a typical election. No one knows what the late-deciders are thinking. We’ll just have to wait and see.
There are any number of other things you could choose to worry about. But there will be plenty of time to start worrying about them after Wednesday or so.
For example: Trump seems to be gearing up once again to claim power even if the voters reject him. He and Speaker Johnson have some “secret plan”. Elie Mystal has a guess about what it might be. And who knows what the Supreme Court will do? Will they let him lose? Every time the Court has had a question put to it, it has ruled for Trump, often in complete opposition to precedent or even written law. How far will it go? I don’t know and neither does anybody else who isn’t on the Court. But unless you’re on the Harris legal team, you can procrastinate on that bit of worrying until the post-election legal battles actually start — which they won’t if Trump wins legitimately (because Democrats respect the voters’ right to reject them).
If Trump wins and begins assembling a fascist administration, that also would be worth worrying about, and even moreso if Republicans get control one or more houses of the new Congress. But worrying about it now won’t give you any special advantage.
As for the next two days: I voted early and I sent Harris a check months ago. I’ve been trying to make the case for her and against him for months. Now all I can do is watch and wait — and try not to obsess about things that may or may not happen.
If you’re trying to convince some last-minute deciders to vote for Harris, here’s some material to work with.
The NYT writes one paragraph that sums up why you shouldn’t vote for Trump, and backs up each statement with a link to a longer article. Matt Yglesias writes a positive case for Harris, which isn’t flashy because it centers on “normal” things like integrity, the rule of law, and taking a pragmatic approach to helping ordinary people solve typical problems like how to afford a house or send their kids to college.
If you’re talking to someone who thinks voting for Trump is the “Christian” position, point them to this guy.
If you’re talking to a progressive who won’t vote for Harris because of Gaza, show them this.
One final thing: As I explained at some length in August, if you think you’re nostalgic for the “Trump economy”, what you’re actually nostalgic for is the pre-Covid economy, when a lot of things were cheaper. But electing Trump won’t bring those days back.
Around the world, governments took very similar actions to keep their economies going while fighting Covid. And around the world, those actions eventually led to inflation; it’s not a Biden/Harris thing. Our inflation happened to show up after Trump left office (because that’s when the new vaccines allowed the economy to reopen) but his actions had as much to do with it as Biden’s. Once you recognize the hit Covid was on the economy — and would have been even if Trump had been reelected in 2020 — you can appreciate how well the Biden/Harris administration has managed the recovery from Covid.
Here’s a metaphor that might help: Think about how you might feel as you leave the hospital after being treated for a heart attack. Do you feel as carefree and vibrant as you did before the heart attack? Probably not. But you also feel a heck of a lot better than you did when you arrived in the ER, and you should appreciate what the doctors did to pull you through.
Trump is selling nostalgia for 2019, before Covid did its damage. But on that day in 2021 when Biden was inaugurated, the “Trump economy” was a mess. It’s much better now.
But to be fragile is not the same as to be perishable, as G.K. Chesterton wrote. Simply do not break a glass, and it will last a thousand years. Smash it, and it will not last an instant. Democracy is like that: fragile, but only if you shatter it.
This week everybody was talking about the campaign
One featured post tries to explain what Trump supporters could possibly be thinking.
I’m still doing my best to ignore polls and pundits’ speculations about who will win. I gather than the race still considered close, which is all I really need to know at this point. For what it’s worth, I will toss in my own speculation: Some last-minute shift will make the result more decisive than it looks now. I can’t say which way the shift will go, but I don’t think we’ll be waiting all week to find out who won.
A Trump campaign spokesman repeated its standard excuse, that the model is a partisan Democrat. After all, she gave $25 to Biden’s 2020 campaign. I’m always amazed anyone takes such claims seriously. I mean, maybe she’s accusing Trump of groping her because she supports his opponents. But isn’t it more likely that she supports his opponents because he groped her?
Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally yesterday is being widely described as a hate-fest. I haven’t had time to digest it all, but apparently warm-up comedian Tony Hinchcliffe thought it would be funny to describe Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean“. Several people have pointed out that Hinchcliffe was using a teleprompter, so the Trump campaign had seen what he would say and presumably approved it.
From the same rally, Tim Miller posts an ironic picture of Elon Musk and Melania Trump — both immigrants — with the Stephen Miller quote “America is for Americans, and Americans only.”
The Democrats’ most powerful speaker continues to be Michelle Obama. In Kalamazoo Saturday, she laid out the extensive consequences for women’s health caused by the abortion bans that followed the Dobbs’ decision, and how Trump could extend many of these consequences to the entire country. She also pleaded with “the men who love us” to understand how their own lives could be affected.
If your wife is shivering and bleeding on the operating table during a routine delivery gone bad, her pressure dropping as she loses more and more blood or some unforeseen infection spreads, and her doctors aren’t sure if they can act, you will be the one praying that it’s not too late. You will be the one pleading for somebody, anybody, to do something.
I had planned to do an article collecting all the former Trump allies who have told us he should never wield power again, but the NYT did it for me.
The standard Trump defense (you can see Vance give it here) is that these are all disgruntled people Trump fired. But usually the cause-and-effect ran in the other direction: Attorney General Bill Barr and cybersecurity czar Chris Krebs were fired because they disputed Trump’s stolen-election lies. Mike Pence is out with Trump because he wouldn’t violate the Constitution for him.
The typical order things happen is: Somebody in TrumpWorld can no longer tolerate the illegal or unethical things they’re being asked to do. Then Trump fires them or otherwise forces them out. They’re fired for disloyalty, not incompetence.
Not to be missed is this Jon Stewart rant about the excuses Republicans make for Trump’s fascist rhetoric about “the enemy within”, and how major media lets them get away with it.
Grist analyzes the climate and environmental significance of a vote for either Harris or Trump.
In Georgia Wednesday, talking about his plans for mass deportation, Trump gave us some more insight into the “again” in “Make American Great Again”. He said:
We had to go back to 1798. That’s when we had laws that were effective.
I don’t know if they still teach this in US History classes, but the 1798 laws he’s talking about are the Alien and Sedition Acts, which were a low point in US civil liberties.
As the Adams administration’s relationship with France deteriorated, Federalists became increasingly worried about immigrants who might have French sympathies. So Congress passed a series of laws that together became known as the Alien and Sedition Acts. One of the Acts was the Alien Friends Act, which gave the president power to deport any non-citizen he considered dangerous.
Another, the Sedition Act, made it a crime for American citizens to “print, utter, or publish…any false, scandalous, and malicious writing” about the government.
Adams was pressured to invoke the AFA against Joseph Priestley, the chemist who isolated oxygen and figured out how to make carbonated water. Priestley had been chased out of England for his sympathy with the French Revolution, and then resettled in Pennsylvania. In many ways Priestley was precisely the kind of person the AFA targeted, but Adams resisted invoking it, citing Priestley’s age and fragility.
It’s impossible to say exactly how intimidated Priestley felt, but after Jefferson (a friend of Priestley and an opponent of the Acts) was elected in 1800, Priestley wrote: “It is only now that I can say I see nothing to fear from the hand of power”.
During the Jefferson administration, some the Acts expired and the others were explicitly repealed. Trump may remember those laws fondly, but he can’t legally invoke them.
and newspaper non-endorsements
The billionaire owners of the Washington Post and LA Times stepped in to prevent their papers from endorsing Kamala Harris. One featured post explains why this “obeying in advance” is a disturbing sign for American democracy.
When talking about how the Steward chain of hospitals went bankrupt, I said that the private equity firm Cerberus (who owned the hospitals) created Medical Properties Trust to sell the hospital’s land to.
The sources I link to don’t actually say that. I extrapolated from the degree of collusion the two firms displayed to conclude that they were two tentacles of the same octopus. But it seems not to be true.
In the blog The Big Picture, David Pepper describes how Ohio broke its public school system. Once ranked fifth among the state systems, it’s now somewhere in the 20s and dropping, after money was siphoned off for charter schools and private school vouchers.
The Tennessee Holler writes about the 400 books Wilson County is removing from school libraries, in accordance with a recent state law.
As I study the list, the fantasy section of the high school libraries seems especially hard hit: George Martin, Sarah Maas, Diana Gabaldon, Margaret Atwood …
For those who aren’t old enough, you cannot imagine how little race tension there was in this country before Obama got into power
This sentiment is surprisingly widespread among White conservatives, and it even becomes true with a small substitution: Replace “little race tension there was in this country” with “comfortable White people were in their privilege”. My rewrite:
For those who aren’t old enough, you cannot imagine how comfortable White people were in their privilege before Obama got into power.
In my view, the increased race tension of the current era comes almost entirely from Whites freaking out about a Black man gaining power.
and let’s close with something slimy
When I closed last week with a microscope enlargement of sugar from a Coke, I didn’t realize that Nikon runs an annual Small World contest for similar photos. So this week I learned that slime mold can be unexpectedly interesting if you enlarge it enough.
This week I refused to pay attention to polls and speculation
I can’t help learning from headlines that the race is still close, and how much more do I need to know? I know who I’m voting for, and I’ve already written my check to the Harris campaign. I could spend all day fretting about whether the likelihood of Harris winning is 55% or 45%, but what’s the point?
Here’s something I learned years and years ago when my wife was being treated for breast cancer: For the first month or two, I combed through all the statistics I could find, trying to find the numbers that fit her exact situation. Eventually, though, it dawned on me that survival and death were both possibilities too likely to ignore. No matter what study I found next, I wasn’t going to be able to tell myself “That’s not going to happen”, and we would also have to keep making long-range plans for our life together. (She lived, and those plans have served us well.)
That was as much as the statistics could tell me, and trying to get a more precise answer out of them was pointless.
Same thing here. On this Election Night “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat” (to use the old Wide World of Sports tagline) will both be legitimate possibilities. You’re going to have to prepare yourself emotionally to face either one. No poll or expert analysis is going to tell you anything more than that.
but I couldn’t help noticing Trump’s weird week
One featured post covers this point, but a few noteworthy odds and ends got left out, like this photo of a Trump makeup fail.
Sure, the photo makes Trump look ridiculous, but that’s not why I call it to your attention. It’s also evidence of a more serious problem: He’s surrounded by people who are afraid to tell him he looks ridiculous. That’s why the prospect of his second term is scarier than his first term was: In his first term, he was hemmed in by people — Don McGahn, John Kelly, Jeff Sessions, etc. — who would tell him that what he wanted to do was illegal. Those people are gone now, and they’ve been replaced by yes-men.
My article also overlooked the fact that the mainstream press (like the NYT, the Boston Globe, and AP) is finally beginning to cover Trump’s deterioration, after obsessing endlessly about Biden’s age issues.
Dave Bautista, former pro wrestler and Marvel’s Drax the Destroyer, gets real about “tough guy” Donald Trump. There’s not a joke in here anywhere, but it’s funny because it’s true.
and Elon’s campaign shenanigans
In the 2020 cycle, Trump and his people told bald-faced lies about Dominion voting machines stealing his votes. The lies were so transparent that Fox News had to pay $787 million to Dominion to settle a defamation suit. (Think about that: Defamation suits are hard to win, especially against news organizations, especially big ones who can afford the best lawyers. Trump threatens to sue news organizations all the time, but he hasn’t collected a dime.)
But why not do it again? Both MTG and Elon were out spreading crap about Dominion this week, and the MAGA sheep are probably swallowing it. You know who’s also doing it: Rasmussen Reports, a supposedly neutral polling organization whose polls always wind up favoring Trump — and get included in many polling averages as if they were legit.
Elon’s money is funding a lot of shady election tactics. Chris Hayes reports on how Muslim voters in Michigan are being micro-targeted with borderline antisemitic ads saying that Harris is all-in for Israel because she is controlled by her Jewish husband, while Jewish voters in Michigan are being micro-targeted with ads saying that Harris “panders to Palestine”. The ads are all from the same group.
They have set up fake sites impersonating the Harris campaign using fake policy positions and then sending out text messages also impersonating the campaign which aim to drive voters to the fake site.
Josh Marshall thinks the fake web site is probably legal, but the texts might not be. Matt Yglesias makes a good point:
It tells you something that they literally made up from scratch a fake version of Kamala Harris to run against.
This should be a bigger story: The richest guy in the world, who could make billions more from the right government contracts, is funding ethically dubious projects to get a fellow billionaire into the White House. Working-class voters who believe Trump is their champion might want to think about that.
and mifepristone, round 2
When the Supreme Court tossed an anti-mifepristone lawsuit on technical grounds, you knew that couldn’t be the end of the story. The other featured post details some of the creepy ideas the new lawsuit raises, like states being upset that their teen birthrate is too low. (When I saw that claim on social media, I didn’t believe it. So I read the 199-page lawsuit and discovered that it’s true.)
and here’s another story that deserves more attention
Capitalism does some things well, but it should be kept far away from other things, like running hospitals.
Thursday, the WaPo published a column summarizing a report Senator Ed Markey put out in September about the collapse of the Steward Health Care hospital chain.
The 34-hospital chain was formed in 2010 by a private equity group, Cerberus, which acquired the hospitals as investments. The WaPo article gives the firm credit for initially having benign intentions: ObamaCare had just passed, so maybe there would be a surge of new patients able to afford health care. Running the hospitals as hospitals looked likely to be a money-maker for Cerberus.
For various reasons that turned out not to be the case. But Cerberus had to produce profits for its investors anyway, so it turned to financial engineering. It formed a real estate investment trust, Medical Properties Trust, which bought the land under Steward hospitals and leased it back to the hospitals. Rather than simply owning the land, the hospitals now had to rent it, increasing annual costs. But the transaction created both a pile of money that Steward could distribute to Cerberus shareholders, as well as a regular income stream Cerberus could collect through MPT.
The downside of this transaction was diminishing the underlying viability of the hospitals, which now struggled to cover their increased costs. In May, the chain declared bankruptcy, and state governments are now spending many millions to keep at-risk communities from losing their hospitals.
In total, Cerberus has said it made roughly $800 million on its investment in Steward, more than tripling its original investment, even as the hospitals themselves were hemorrhaging cash.
As best I can tell, none of this is illegal. It’s just one more example of capitalists taking risks where the profits will be private but the losses can be socialized.
Similar stories can be told about private equity’s role in the destruction of America’s newspapers, especially local ones: Take over a challenged but surviving paper, borrow massively against its assets to pay inflated “management fees” to the investment company, then declare bankruptcy. It’s a slow-motion version of what Tony’s mob does to a local business in the “Bust Out” episode of The Sopranos.
In mythology, Cerberus is the name of Hades’ three-headed dog, who guards the gate to the Land of the Dead. It’s a rather macabre name for a firm that owns hospitals.
and you also might be interested in …
From the UK, The Economist notices something a lot of American media misses: The US economy is “The Envy of the World“.
Israel announced the death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, the likely mastermind behind the October 7 attacks. Under a different administration, Israel might use this event to declare victory and start moving towards peace.
And if you want to understand the related movement of White Christian Nationalism, Kat Abu has an hour-long video explaining it.
Doug Balloon puts aside his satirical NYT Pitchbot persona to opine about WHY the NYT has covered the campaign as badly as it has, and in particular why it has consistently sanewashed Trump. He decides against any cynical argument about financial advantage and instead attributes the Times’ behavior to simple incompetence and laziness: “their system isn’t built to deal with a narcissistic sociopath” and they don’t want to change. The company is run by a “nepo baby” who is the son of a nepo baby, and he has hired high-level people who aren’t very good at their jobs.
Not to say there aren’t lots and lots of great journalists and editors at the Times. It pays well and it’s tough to get good jobs in journalism, so they can certainly hire lots of great people. But I suspect that on the really big decisions, ones where Sulzberger himself or people near him weigh in, the fact neither Sulzberger or the people near him are very smart or competent plays a big role.
A commenter recently pointed me to this Lancet article, claiming that the actual number of deaths caused by the war in Gaza is probably much higher than the official estimate. Wars, the article points out, commonly produce “indirect deaths” well beyond the number of people who directly die by violence. These deaths are from disease, malnutrition, and various other causes, and they may occur even after the violence ends. Looking at past conflicts, the article claims the total death toll could be between 3 and 15 times the official count of around 42,000.
I always come back from a driving trip with a new podcast to recommend. This time I listened to Trevor Noah’s “What Now?”. In particular, Noah’s interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates is amazing. In the final essay in his new book The Message, Coates compared the Israeli occupation of the West Bank to South Africa’s apartheid. Noah grew up in South Africa, and was 10 when apartheid ended. They have a lot of interesting things to say.
and let’s close with something tiny
Ever since Anton van Leeuwenhoek began to popularize the microscope in the early 1600s, people have been amazed by what ordinary objects look like under extreme magnification. In this article Scientist assembles beautiful and surprising images of extremely small things, like this close-up of a sugar found in Coca-Cola.
This week everybody should have been talking about good economic news
The pandemic laid a one-two punch on the world economy. First came the job losses, and then an inflation spike associated with reopening the economy. Those same two phenomena happened all over the world, which is why (as I often point out) it’s a mistake to blame either Trump for the job losses or Biden for the inflation.
Sadly, though, most Americans understand only half of that truth: They give Trump a mulligan for his job losses while blaming Biden for inflation. In the public mind, the “Trump economy” is the pre-Covid 2019 economy, while Biden is held responsible for everything that has happened since.
What is remarkable, though, is how fast the US economy has bounced back, and the Biden administration deserves a lot of credit for that. In 2023, inflation-adjusted household income very nearly regained its 2019 high, and may well be at record levels by now. I have had trouble finding apples-to-apples statistics from other countries, but I believe no comparable nation has done as well with the Covid one-two punch as the US has.
This week we got more evidence for this view: The September jobs report came out showing a very strong economy: 254K new jobs were added (about 100K beyond economists’ expectations) and the unemployment rate ticked down to 4.1%.
Other good news: The East Coast dockworkers strike was suspended, preventing a major disruption of the economy just weeks before the election. (The work stoppage we did see is comparable to a spate of bad weather.) The shipping companies made a new offer, which was close enough to what unions are looking for to continue negotiations through January 15.
By coincidence, this week was also marked by the publication of a new book, The Message, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, who is the foremost Black public intellectual, and possibly the most significant American public intellectual. The final chapter of the book discusses his trip to the West Bank. (I haven’t read the whole book, but I have read that chapter.)
The controversy this chapter has raised underlines a point I made in the featured post: how hard it is to have a reasonable discussion of Israel/Palestine. A broad theme of The Message is how writers shape the world by deciding whose stories get told. People whose stories aren’t told don’t get fully envisioned as human beings.
Coates sees the Palestinians as such people, and tries to counteract their less-than status by telling some of their stories. He notes that no news organization he is aware of has a Palestinian bureau chief in Jerusalem. When Palestine is discussed in American media, Palestinian voices are usually not included. (I’m guilty of this myself. Even when I criticize Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, I am usually linking to liberal American Jews like Peter Beinart.)
In some circles Coates has been met with vitriol, and broad implications that he is antisemitic. One CBS interviewer in particular went after him for not including more Israeli points of view. (He does talk to ex-IDF Israelis sympathetic to the Palestinian situation.) Coates kept his cool and explained that Israeli points of view are already widely available in American media.
Coates has also faced criticism for not being a Middle Eastern expert and missing the complexity of the situation. If I might put words in Coates’ mouth, he seems to be saying that solutions may be complicated, but certain basic moral judgments are simple.
The book makes many analogies between the Palestinian apartheid and slavery/Jim Crow in the US, so I’ll make another one: Before the Civil War, many Northerners toured the South and came back to denounce slavery. Universally, Southerners responded the way many have responded to Coates: They said the Northerners didn’t understand the complexities of the situation. How would a post-slavery Southern economy work? How would the races coexist? It was complicated.
But you didn’t need answers to those questions to look at the immediate reality of slavery and say “This is wrong.” That’s what Coates does. He wanders through neighborhoods of the West Bank, sees how people are treated, and says “This is wrong.”
and Jack Smith’s evidence
The Supreme Court has done a lot to help Trump get away with his January 6 coup. They sat on their hands to delay their decision as long as possible, and then invented a notion of “presidential immunity” that no lower court had any notion of. It’s not in the Constitution and there’s no indication that any pre-Trump administration believed it had such immunity.
As a result, Trump’s trial has been pushed past the election, and may not happen at all. This means that voters will have to decide the 2024 election without knowing precisely how Trump tried to invalidate the 2020 election. January 6 has become a he-said/she-said event, rather than the subject of a jury verdict.
But part of the delay is that the district court has to determine what charges and what evidence can survive the Supreme Court’s ruling. So Jack Smith assembled a 165-page brief describing the evidence he wants to present at trial and why he thinks it should not be subject to presidential immunity. This is as much of the evidence against Trump as the public is going to see before the election.
As usual, Trump has had nothing specific to say about the evidence presented in the filing, but only assailed it in general as “election interference” and a “witch hunt”. In response, two facts are worth pointing out:
Very little of the evidence the special counsel has collected comes from Democrats or never-Trump Republicans. Nearly all of it references grand jury testimony under oath by Republicans who supported the Trump campaign through Election Day. (A few, like Bill Barr, only broke with him after he started lying about his electoral defeat.)
The brief is appearing now, just before the election, because Trump has pursued every opportunity for delay, and the Republicans on the Supreme Court have aided and abetted him at every turn. Otherwise, this trial would have been over by now. If he really were innocent — which he isn’t — Trump could have cleared his name long before the election.
and the VP debate
Last week I said that VP debates seldom move the needle in an election, and I think that held true for the Walz/Vance debate. [video, transcript]
Debates always have two impacts: in the moment and over time. People who watched the debate live tended to see Vance as the smoother debater who had fewer awkward moments. But the lasting impressions favor Walz: He confronted Vance directly on the question of who won the 2020 election, which Vance could not bring himself to answer. And Vance’s objection to being fact-checked crystallized his ticket’s approach, which is to get away with saying whatever they can, without regard to truth. Going forward, both clips provide fodder for Harris/Walz attack ads.
Vance’s nonanswer underlines something more general and ominous: The GOP has become an autocratic party where no one dares to offend the autocrat. We saw the same thing this weekend with Speaker Mike Johnson.
On Sunday, George Stephanopoulos asked Johnson whether he can “unequivocally” say that Biden won the 2020 election and that Trump lost. The long-debunked election conspiracy is something that the former president continues to bring up at his campaign rallies, even a month before the 2024 election.
“See, this is the game that is always played by mainstream media with leading Republicans. It’s a gotcha game,” Johnson said on ABC’s “This Week.” “You want us to litigate things that happened four years ago when we’re talking about the future. We’re not gonna talk about what happened in 2020, we’re gonna talk about 2024 and how we’re gonna solve the problems for the American people.”
If Trump started saying that the sky is purple, it would become a “gotcha question” to ask other Republicans what color the sky is. They cannot contradict him, no matter how ridiculous his statements are. And this is what Trump wants for the country.
and the Helene aftermath
Most hurricanes’ worst damage comes from the high winds and storm surge near landfall, as when Katrina hit New Orleans. But Helene‘s most serious impacts have come from the heavy rains that it carried inland to places like Asheville, North Carolina, which sits in the Appalachian mountain range.
This situation has created opportunities for unscrupulous demagogues. Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example, has promoted the outrageous conspiracy theory that Helene was sent towards rural areas that the Biden/Harris administration doesn’t care about.
Yes they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.
The all-powerful “they”. There’s nothing “they” can’t do. Fortunately, that charge was too crazy to catch on, and MTG’s tweet mainly resulted in ridicule directed at her.
But Donald Trump’s lies, echoed by many other Republicans, have been just credible enough to cause harm. Most damaging has been the claim that FEMA has run out of money because it spent it all housing foreign migrants.
At a campaign rally in Michigan on Thursday, Trump claimed that “Kamala spent all her FEMA money, billions of dollars, on housing for illegal migrants, many of whom should not be in our country.” He added in an election-related conspiracy theory, saying, “They stole the FEMA money, just like they stole it from a bank, so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them this season.”
This statement packs a number of lies into a small package.
Noncitizens can’t vote, and there is no evidence that Harris or anyone else is trying to get them to.
Housing for migrants is a separate appropriation from disaster relief. FEMA manages both pots of money, but keeps them separate. Nothing has been stolen.
FEMA has not run out of money to respond to the disaster. If the $35 billion appropriated for disaster relief runs out, Congress can pass a supplemental appropriation, which it frequently does after major disasters. (If there is any delay in that process, it will be due to Speaker Johnson.)
Spreading this kind of disinformation has negative consequences for the very people Trump claims to be standing up for: If they think there’s no money, they may not apply for help they need.
And that’s just the tip of Trump’s iceberg of Helene-related lies. He has also falsely claimed
Democrats don’t want to help victims in Republican areas. (Republican governors and other local officials say otherwise.)
Federal help maxes out at $750. (In fact, $750 is what victims can get for immediate needs like groceries, and doesn’t affect their eligibility for further help.)
Federal helicopters aren’t rescuing people in North Carolina.
This is all just stuff he makes up for his own political advantage. It’s further evidence of a major Harris-campaign theme: Trump doesn’t care about you. He only cares about himself.
At long last, the NYT raises the question of Trump’s age and whether he is all-there mentally.
Trump and Vance are claiming they don’t support a federal abortion “ban”, but that’s because they’ve started calling it something different: a “minimum national standard” on abortion.
Josh Marshall has been digging deep into the Trump get-out-the-vote (GOTV) operation, which might be trying out a novel theory or might just be failing.
GOTV is an important part of the inside-baseball of campaigning. Typically, GOTV isn’t about convincing people to vote for you — that’s already happened or not happened — it’s about making sure that the people who lean in your direction actually do vote. So you develop lists of people to call, looking for folks who don’t always vote, but have told past callers that they favor you. (Or maybe they just look like your voters demographically). Close to the election you contact those iffy voters, making sure they know where their polling place is, how they’re going to get there, and so on, offering help as needed.
By itself, GOTV isn’t going to produce a landslide, but a good vs. bad GOTV operation can make the difference in a close election. That’s why some Republicans have been expressing alarm about the apparent lack of a Trump GOTV push. Marshall has been trying to get to the bottom of these rumors.
What he’s finding is that Trump people had a decentralized GOTV concept intended to supplement the usual door-knocking and phone-banking. But more and more it looks like the decentralized plan is replacing their traditional GOTV, which is a big gamble. Partly that’s happening because the money for traditional GOTV instead went to pay Trump’s legal bills.
Susan Faludi writes in the NYT about how the “protection” theme works differently for male and female candidates. Trump can fear-monger and then tell women: “I will be your protector.” But a woman offering men protection runs into a deep resentment: “You cannot defend us without unmanning us.”
She also notes how protection comes in two flavors: protection from threats in the real world, and symbolically acting out the tropes of strength.
The symbolic is performative. Those who crave it don’t actually want effective measures to alleviate a threat. They wish to rage against the threat, and they seek a protector in chief who validates their wrath. For them, war’s the point, not victory — outrage, not outcomes
… Time and time again, nations that have sought protection under a fantasy führer — or a real one — have reaped the whirlwind. This fall, I’m voting my fears, too, but what I fear most is the whirlwind. I’m voting my need for protection, as well. I want a Constitution protected from the paper shredders. I want democratic process and the rule of law protected from rioters and scammers. I want reasoned and stable governance, exemplified by a president whose lodestar is the well-being and security of her citizenry, not the bloodlust of his base. I want, most of all, the fate of my nation to be protected against the judgment that history’s gods level against strongman societies.
The protection theme exemplifies the often misunderstood concept of structural privilege or structural discrimination. Male and female candidates can make the same promises, but the man will be cheered while the woman provokes dismay or anger. It’s not how she words or delivers the pledge, it’s the fact that she’s a woman.
Saturday, Elon Musk spoke (and danced wildly) at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania. I can only imagine the right-wing outrage if Mark Zuckerberg or any other social-media mogul appeared at a Harris rally.
This is a common pattern: Baseless right-wing accusations (like that social media favors Democrats) often lead to the Right blatantly doing that very thing. In the 2020 cycle, for example, Trump’s false charge that Biden had stolen the election justified his very real attempt to steal it through fraud and force.
and you also might be interested in …
Cory Doctorow uses Amazon Prime’s decision to start showing its customers even more ads to illustrate the general concept of “enshittification” (a term he coined in 2022).
Every ad that Amazon shows you shifts value away from you — your time, your attention — to the company’s shareholders.
That’s the crux of enshittification. Companies don’t enshittify — making their once-useful products monotonically worse — because it amuses them to erode the quality of their offerings. They enshittify them because their products are zero-sum: the things that make them valuable to you (watching videos without ads) make things less valuable to them (because they can’t monetize your attention).
Effective immediately, all Oklahoma schools are required to incorporate the Bible, which includes the Ten Commandments, as an instructional support.
Now he’s asking the legislature for $3 million to buy 55,000 Bibles to put in Oklahoma’s classrooms. But issues of church-and-state aside, The Oklahoman found something fishy.
According to the bid documents, vendors must meet certain specifications: Bibles must be the King James Version; must contain the Old and New Testaments; must include copies of the Pledge of Allegiance, Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights; and must be bound in leather or leather-like material.
Almost no Bibles on the market meet all those criteria, but two do: The God Bless the U.S.A. Bible for $60 each, and the We the People Bible for $90. Both are endorsed by Donald Trump. A few months ago, BBC reported that Trump had made $300,000 from the first one.
Paying $60-$90 for a leather-bound Bible just isn’t necessary. The text of the Bible can be downloaded free online, and there are a variety of free Bible apps for your phone. If you insist on a physical copy, you’ll find a wide selection for less than $10. In any version, you can look at John 2:14-16 to see how Jesus felt about this kind of profiteering.
and let’s close with something that turns down the voltage
You don’t see a lot of cartoons based on electrical engineering concepts.
Here’s the guy that inherited $200 million. If he hadn’t inherited $200 million, you know where Donald Trump would be right now? Selling watches in Manhattan.
Hurricane Helene hit the Florida panhandle Friday as a Category 4 hurricane, then proceeded inland through Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, and Tennessee “causing 64 deaths and severe damage. Millions lost power, and the storm caused up to $110 billion in losses, with rescue efforts still underway in many areas.“
Disaster footage hits harder when you recognize the places the news people are talking about. Here’s a news clip from Asheville, NC, where I’ve vacationed.
There’s always an argument about whether any particular storm or disaster is caused by climate change, but Helene’s rapid transition from Category 2 to Category 4 is the kind of thing that didn’t used to happen. Hurricanes pick up energy from warm ocean waters, and climate change has been warming the oceans.
The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories
and Mayor Adams’ indictment
The most recent Democrat to run afoul of Biden’s Department of Justice is New York Mayor Eric Adams, who was indicted Wednesday on five counts, revolving around bribery and illegal campaign contributions from sources related to the government of Turkey. (The NY Post had a classic headline: “Grand Theft Ottoman“.) The charges go back to his term as Borough President of Brooklyn.
Adams has pleaded not guilty and pledged to stay in office.
Merrick Garland’s Justice Department is supposedly “weaponized” against Republicans, but somehow they’ve found time to prosecute not just Adams, but also Democratic Senator Bob Menendez and Congressman Henry Cuellar, in addition to Jack Smith’s indictments of Donald Trump. Maybe it’s time to recognize that DoJ is just enforcing the law.
As satisfying as such results are to a country at war, they tend to have little long-term impact. American attacks in Afghanistan were constantly killing high-ranking Taliban officials, and yet the Taliban won the war. Nasrallah himself replaced a previous Hezbollah commander who was killed by an Israeli raid in 1992.
As long as there is grass-roots support for resistance, new leaders will always emerge. And short of genocide, there is no purely military way to stamp out grass-roots resistance. Ultimately, peace has to be negotiated with leaders who have enough popular credibility to make concessions.
Israel’s fundamental problem is that it’s holding millions of Palestinians who lack basic rights and there are many people all over the Middle East who are outraged by that, and some of them are willing to fight Israel over it.
That fact has military consequences, but at its root is not a problem with a military solution.
Thomas Friedman sees Netanyahu’s strategy as a blunder that risks Israel’s future.
Israel is in terrible danger. It is fighting the most just war in its history — responding to the brutal, unprovoked murder and abduction of women and children and grandparents by Hamas — and yet today Israel is more of a pariah state than ever.
Why? Because when you fight a war like this with no political horizon for this long — one that denies any possibility for more-moderate Palestinians to govern Gaza — the Israeli military operation there just starts to look like endless killing for killing’s sake. That is just what Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran want.
The people I am quoting here are not antisemites or even anti-Zionists. They are American Jews with a strong commitment to Israel who see no future in the current Israeli policies.
and Trump jumping the shark
I was skeptical two weeks ago when Jay Kuo posted “He’s jumped the shark” to his Substack blog.
Jumping the shark became a cautionary metaphor for when a show goes awry and is desperate for new ideas and ratings. And since Trump is fundamentally a television personality, and we are all living through his twisted reality show, it is notable that, in desperation over his flagging candidacy and polls showing him trailing Vice President Kamala Harris, the writer, producer and chief protagonist of Unhappy Days has now jumped the shark, too.
Kuo interpreted the eating-cats-and-dogs libel and “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” as shark jumps, desperate pleas for the public attention Trump used to get as a matter of course. Well, maybe. Both took old reliable Trump themes — immigrants are ruining America and outspoken women are nasty — and turned them up to 11. But I wasn’t convinced.
Lately, though, Trump himself has been convincing me. Another longstanding Trump theme has been: “I’m a billionaire. Can you send me your money?” Initially, of course, he bragged about being so rich he could self-fund his 2016 campaign. (“I don’t need anybody’s money.“) But that didn’t last, and much of that early self-funding consisted of loans that were paid back to him by red-hatters from trailer parks who sent his campaign $25 a month.
But as Election Day approaches and the possibility of permanent exile from the spotlight looms, Trump may not be campaigning that hard, but he is going all out to fleece his sheep as thoroughly as possible. The latest grifts are dialed up well past 11, to 14 or 15.
Of course there are the $500 gold (or silver, if you’re not really a true believer) Trump sneakers, and the autographed Trump Bible for $1,000 — or $60 without the signature. ($1,000 is cheap. You’re thousands of years too late to get Jesus or Moses to autograph your Bible. But it’s not too late for Trump.) Those have been available for a long time.
But now you can get a gold-plated coin commemorating him surviving the July assassination attempt. And $99 Trump digital trading cards that (if you buy 75 or more of them) will get you a fragment of the suit he wore when he debated Biden in June.
Even that is just chump change, though. If you’re a real Trumper, how can you resist the new Trump Watch? For a mere $100K, you can get 1 of 147 numbered gold watches with diamonds. They don’t actually exist yet, will probably be made in China, may not look like the ones in the ad, and Trump has nothing to do with them other than a licensing agreement and a marketing video. But they’re guaranteed to be gaudy and say “Trump” somewhere. What more could you ask for?
Too rich for your blood? Get the $499 version (which The Bulwark estimates costs $60 to make; they guess the $100K watch might cost as much as $20K).
And then there are Trump investments. If you had bought Trump Media stock when it went public on March 26, you might have paid $79 a share. Friday it closed at $14.75, so your $10,000 investment would be worth $1,867. And even at that price, investment professionals warn that it’s wildly overvalued.
Given that DJT’s main asset is the social media platform Truth Social, with annual revenues less than $5 million, it’s hard to validate an enterprise value above $2 billion.
Have any more capital burning a hole in your pocket? Soon you’ll be able to invest in World Liberty Financial, a Trump-controlled cryptocurrency exchange that will have its own digital coin (which you could use to bribe the president should Trump manage to win the election). Now that’s a sure thing if I’ve ever seen one.
Trump has also been pushing his authoritarian rhetoric past 11. In Erie Sunday, he discussed shoplifting and other retail crime. His solution: Turn the police loose on criminals without any rules.
The police aren’t allowed to do their job. … You know, if you had one day, like, one real rough, nasty day … One rough hour, and I mean real rough. The word will get out and it will end immediately. End immediately. You know? It will end immediately.
A right-wing media-watching group says that Google’s search algorithm is more favorable to Harris than Trump. Trump’s reaction: Prosecute Google.
This is an ILLEGAL ACTIVITY, and hopefully the Justice Department will criminally prosecute them for this blatant Interference of Elections. If not, and subject to the Laws of our Country, I will request their prosecution, at the maximum levels, when I win the Election, and become President of the United States!
They were very brave, the Supreme Court. Very brave. And they take a lot of hits because of it. It should be illegal, what happens. You know, you have these guys like playing the ref, like the great Bobby Knight. These people should be put in jail the way they talk about our judges and our justices, trying to … sway their vote, sway their decision.
Republicans continue to discuss abortion in the most ham-handed ways. A little over a week ago, Ohio Senate candidate Bernie Moreno said this:
You know, the left has a lot of single issue voters. Sadly, by the way, there’s a lot of suburban women, a lot of suburban women that are like, “Listen, abortion is it. If I can’t have an abortion in this country whenever I want, I will vote for anybody else.” … OK. It’s a little crazy by the way, but — especially for women that are like past 50 — I’m thinking to myself, “I don’t think that’s an issue for you.”
Yeah. How dare a woman who can’t get pregnant care about abortion? Only men who can’t get pregnant are allowed to care about abortion. People should only care about issues that effect their bodies. Why do you care about it, Bernie Moreno? It’s abortion, not the rising price of extra-small condoms.
More generally, Moreno’s “whenever I want” framing shows a profound misunderstanding of the whole concept of Freedom. There may be a lot of things I don’t want to do at the moment. But that doesn’t I’m OK with the government telling me I can’t do them. For example, I may not be planning to read any of the books Moms for “Liberty” wants to ban from public libraries. But I still object to banning them, because Freedom.
And then there’s this from Trump, which I’m cobbling together from twosources:
I make this statement to the great women of our country. Sadly, women are poorer than they were four years ago, are less healthy than they were four years ago, are less safe on the streets than they were four years ago, are paying much higher prices for groceries and everything else than they were four years ago. I will fix all of that, and fast, and at long last this nation, and national nightmare, will end. It will end. Because I am your protector. … You will no longer be abandoned, lonely or scared. You will no longer be in danger. You’re not gonna be in danger any longer. You will no longer have anxiety from all of the problems our country has today. You will be protected, and I will be your protector. Women will be happy, healthy, confident and free. You will no longer be thinking about abortion.
My first thought after hearing this was “These are not the droids you’re looking for.” Trump seems to be making a very inept attempt to do a Jedi mind-trick, and I’m not sure who he expects to fall for it. Women are supposed to forget about their right to bodily autonomy because a man (who has a long history of fraud) offers some vague promises about how wonderful he will make their lives? Who’s going to buy that pitch?
and you also might be interested in …
The Walz-Vance vice presidential debate is tomorrow night. I expect Walz to do well, but VP debates seldom move the needle.
A progressive grass-roots media group in Michigan posts a disturbing report about their experiences at a Trump rally in Warren Friday. I’m not putting too much stock in it, because it is an anti-MAGA group I’ve never heard of before, and they offer no video or other supporting evidence. But it’s worth noting to see if it lines up with any subsequent reports.
In Eugene, Oregon you get three choices when you call for help from the city: Police, Fire, and CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the Streets). If somebody is losing control and acting out in disturbing (but not obviously dangerous) ways, maybe they don’t need armed police officers shouting orders at them. Some other professionals might be better trained to deal with their situation.
Here, all you have to do is press 3 instead of 1. This is what is meant by “defund the police” (a phrase that we need to eliminate asap). Diverting SOME funds away from police in order to bolster community services like this.
I don’t think anyone can dispute either of those two points: that there’s been no coverage of Trump’s dementia comparable to the discussion of Biden’s age and that hacked Democratic campaign emails would be getting covered. That’s a different standard and one that is markedly lower for Trump. It’s that simple. It doesn’t mean that the Times hasn’t taught the public a lot about Trump. There have been a lot of revealing stories. But they are easier on Trump than on other candidates. That’s how narcissistic sociopaths work. They get weak institutions to make special rules for them.
This week everybody was talking about keeping the government open
It looks like House Republicans aren’t eager to sacrifice themselves for Trump. Trump had been demanding that any deal to keep the government open include the Save Act, requiring proof of citizenship for a person to register to vote. It’s not clear what real-world problem that was supposed to solve, since non-citizen voting is already illegal and there is no evidence that law has been ineffective. But it would reinforce among the MAGA faithful the false impression that non-citizens are voting Democratic in large numbers. That, in turn, might set up all sorts of shenanigans should Trump lose again in November. Wednesday, he posted this on Truth Social:
If Republicans don’t get the SAVE Act, and every ounce of it, they should not agree to a Continuing Resolution in any way, shape, or form. Democrats are registering Illegal Voters by the TENS OF THOUSANDS, as we speak – They will be voting in the 2024 Presidential Election, and they shouldn’t be allowed to. Only American Citizens should be voting in our Most Important Election in History, or any Election!
It’s time for another round of Republican limbo: North Carolina candidate for governor Mark Robinson just set the bar lower than ever, and the GOP continues to contort its moral standards to pass under it with him.
So CNN found a bunch of messages Robinson posted to a message board on the porn site Nude Africa between 2008 and 2012. (I haven’t seen them, but I am told many include disgusting images.) In the printable ones, he proclaimed himself a “black NAZI” and advocated bringing slavery back, saying “Some people need to be slaves.”
Robinson denies he posted those messages, but CNN has pretty good evidence it’s him. If he’s being framed, somebody must have started building the frame back in 2008, when Robinson was not a public figure.
Robinson was already trailing Democrat Josh Stein by 9.4%, largely because of his penchant for ridiculously inflammatory statements, like comparing transpeople to “maggots” and “flies”, telling them to “find a corner outside somewhere” rather than use a gendered bathroom, and saying that “Abortion in this country is not about protecting the lives of mothers. It is about killing the child because you weren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down.” The posts on Nude Africa are shocking at one level, but on another level they sound like him. Whatever he says, he says bigly. David French puts it like this:
No one, however, should be surprised. Even before the primary, Robinson’s horrific character was on display. Among other things, he had called school shooting survivors who advocated gun control “media prosti-tots,” accused Michelle Obama of being a man, and trafficked in so many antisemitic tropes that his election as lieutenant governor in 2020 was an alarm bell for Jewish leaders in the state.
In other words, Republican voters knew he was a bad man when they chose him. Now they know he is a very bad man.
In the pre-Trump era, something like the Nude Africa posts would have been immediately disqualifying, and members of his own party would be demanding that Robinson leave the race. But the GOP is standing by him, because the only standard the Party has these days is loyalty to Trump, who hasn’t rescinded his ringing endorsements, like when he called Robinson “Martin Luther King on steroids“.
This is the problem for us Republicans. As long as Donald Trump is your recruiting agent for candidates in swing states, we’re going to continue to get our rear ends handed to us.
French thinks Trump’s damage to his party goes further:
In nine years, countless Republican primary voters have moved from voting for Trump in spite of his transgressions to rejecting anyone who doesn’t transgress. If you’re not transgressive, you’re suspicious. Decency is countercultural in the Republican Party. It’s seen as a rebuke of Trump.
and the race
Since my state-of-the-race post last week, the national polls haven’t changed much: from Harris +2.7 to Harris +2.6 in the 538 average, and Harris +1.8 to Harris +2.2 in RCP. Some of the state polls look better, particularly Pennsylvania, which went from Harris +0.6 to Harris +1.3.
When I watched her interview yesterday with a woman who is destroying, through her complete and total incompetence, America, I couldn’t help but think this isn’t the real Oprah
It’s hard to tell whether “not the real Oprah” is supposed to be metaphoric or whether he thinks she’s physically been replaced.
Heather Cox Richardson looks at the history of the Electoral College, and the persistent advantage it gives Republicans. Unlike some historians, she doesn’t attribute the origin of the EC to pro-slavery interests, but she believes pro-slavery interests made it impossible to eliminate in the 1830s. I hadn’t realized that the winner-take-all provision for each state’s electoral votes (other than Nebraska and Maine) wasn’t part of the Founders’ original vision.
and Trump’s armed stalker
It’s fascinating to me how quickly the second Trump “assassination attempt” story has come and gone, except inside the MAGA information silos.
One factor is how much less the story turned out to be than the first announcement — that shots had been fired on a course where Trump was golfing. It turned out the shots had been fired by Secret Service agents at a guy hiding in the bushes with a rifle, who never got a good look at Trump. Without the agents’ intervention, it might have turned into an assassination attempt. (So the Deep State saves the day again!) But all it really amounted to was an armed stalking.
And then there were the unnecessary conspiracy theories. Like: Trump’s round of golf wasn’t on his schedule, so how could the would-be assassin have known? It must have been an inside job! Well, cellphone records say he had been waiting in the woods for 12 hours. If you’re looking for Trump, pick out a day when he’s not campaigning and stake out his golf course. How much inside knowledge does that take?
Residents say Trump spends almost every Sunday at the West Palm Beach golf club when he is not on the campaign trail.
Then there was how quickly Trump moved to take advantage of the incident. A bunch of social media criticism went something like: “The first thing I do when someone tries to kill me is send out a fund-raising email.”
MAGA World’s attempts to “connect the dots” with the assassination attempt in Butler in July and from there link to Harris or Biden or the Deep State or some mysterious “they” were implausibly vacuous.
They are going to keep trying to kill Trump. This is only beginning. This stops only when we win in November.
The Butler guy was a conservative gun-nut who wanted to kill somebody important. Trump appears to have been a target of opportunity. Trump’s golf-course stalker is more plausibly motivated by politics, but we don’t yet know how. Neither appears to have any Biden/Harris connection.
Apparently the stalker did intend to assassinate Trump, but his motives don’t sound like they were lifted from any Democrat’s speeches.
Trump “ended relations with Iran like a child and now the Middle East has unraveled,” the letter says.
Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country, and they are the ones that are destroying the country.
Trump has never once addressed the death threats his fans make against anybody who gets in his way: Judges Merchan and Chutkan, DAs Fani Willis and Alan Bragg, election workers like Shaye Moss. And he promises to pardon those convicted for committing violence in his name.
Vance complains that Democrats (truthfully) labeling Trump a “threat to democracy” is “going to get somebody killed“, but then goes on to lie about Haitians eating people’s cats.
It’s not working for them.
and how the media covers Trump
NYT reporter Maggie Haberman was interviewed on NPR Thursday, and showed real cluelessness about why her newspaper in particular and the media in general are being criticized.
I think that the media does a very good job covering Trump. … I think there is an industry, bluntly, Dave, that is dedicated toward attacking the media, especially as it relates to covering Donald Trump and all coverage of Trump. And I think that Trump is a really difficult figure to cover because he challenges news media process every day, has for years. The systems are just fundamentally – they were not built to deal with somebody who says things that are not true as often as he does or speaks as incoherently as he often does. I think the media has actually done a very good job showing people who he is, what he says, what he does. I think most of the information that the public has about Trump is because of reporting by the media. And I guess I don’t really understand how this industry that literally exists to attack the press broadly – and the media is not a monolith. It’s not a league. But this industry that exists to do that – I don’t see how they think they are a solution by undermining faith in what we do. That’s been very confusing to me. … I’m talking about criticism on the left.
James Fallows responded on X by suggesting someone at the Times address the specific criticisms people are making: like why Biden’s cognitive issues got highlighted while Trump’s are ignored, and “Why framing / headline / social-promo of stories takes a certain shape so predictably as to have given rise to the Pitchbot”.
This drew the satirical NYT Pitchbot into the discussion, which Jonathan Chait slammed as a “hacky, tin-eared comedy account”. That caused the Pitchbot’s author to drop his comedy mask and engage, making some very good points.
I don’t think anyone can dispute either of those two points: that there’s been no coverage of Trump’s dementia comparable to the discussion of Biden’s age and that hacked Democratic campaign emails would be getting covered. [The press has refused to publish the Trump emails Iran hacked.] That’s a different standard and one that is markedly lower for Trump. It’s that simple. It doesn’t mean that the Times hasn’t taught the public a lot about Trump. There have been a lot of revealing stories. But they are easier on Trump than on other candidates. That’s how narcissistic sociopaths work. They get weak institutions to make special rules for them.
I’ll add my two cents: The media in general, the NYT, and Haberman in particular have been doing a bad job covering Trump. They’ve been applying lower standards to him, for example, often covering what-he-meant rather than what-he-said, when they refused to give Biden that consideration. Lots of serious journalists like Fallows have noticed, as well as humorists like the creator of the NYT Pitchbot. It takes real arrogance to lump together the people who notice your failings and dismiss them as “an industry dedicated to attacking the media”.
and you also might be interested in …
The Federal Reserve finally has started cutting interest rates, signalling that it believes inflation is no longer a major threat to the economy.
In Brazil, Elon Musk and his X social media platform have been fighting the law. The Guardian reports: “The law appears to have won.”
The platform bowed to one of the key demands made by Brazil’s supreme court by appointing a legal representative in the country. It also paid outstanding fines and took down user accounts that the court had ordered to be removed on the basis that they threatened the country’s democracy, the New York Times reported.
Musk had been resisting removing the accounts (basically for denying that former right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro had lost his reelection bid) citing his commitment to free speech. However, he only seems to resist requests from liberal democratic governments. He has been much more cooperative with the governments of Turkey and India, the article notes.
If you want to dig into the nuts-and-bolts of creating a sustainable economy, particularly how that economy will generate and distribute electric power, you should be reading David Roberts’ “Volts” blog on Substack. (Like most Substack blogs, Volts will ask you to subscribe, but let you read the content even if you don’t.)
I don’t quote Volts that often, usually because it delves deeper into the details than this blog ought to. But one recent post worth your while is his interview with Heather Boushey, a member of President Biden’s Council of Economic Advisors and the chief economist for his Invest in America Cabinet. She’s discussing the “$910 billion in announced investments all across the country in semiconductors, clean energy, manufacturing, batteries and EVs, bio-manufacturing, heavy industry, and clean power” that has come from the big bills Biden got passed before Republicans took over the House: the Inflation Reduction Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the CHIPS Act.
What I find interesting here is not so much the specifics as the public/private investment approach she describes. As she puts it: “Markets don’t always deliver optimal outcomes. But, on the other hand, markets are amazing.” Markets themselves are neither blind nor all-wise, but they do certain things very well. Government incentives should lay out the playing field, but private-sector players should play the game.
It seems to be working. The public investment capital is drawing in many times that much in private investment. New productive capacity is being built and jobs are being created — many of them in the parts of the country that need jobs most. The public investments are not just in basic research — a role Roberts notes that even many libertarians endorse — but in opening the bottlenecks that keep research advances from being implemented.
Interestingly, this public money is turning into the exact opposite of patronage. By targeting areas that have suffered from disinvestment and job flight, the Biden administration has wound up channeling most of this investment money to Republican counties.
and let’s close with something graphic
When I joined BlueSky, not that many people were on it yet. So the first people I followed were just about anybody I had heard of, like comic-book creator Kurt Busiek (“Astro City”). From there, by following people other people followed, I wound up with a social-media feed very different from what I see on X: odd and creative and whimsical.
That’s how I discovered Sarah Andersen. Sarah’s cartoons tend to be witchy, cat-oriented, and just slightly dark. I’ve been enjoying them.
Haitians are — culturally, my wife Fran and I have seen this when we’ve been down in Haiti — education is prized. So when you look at all of these things, people who want to work, people who value their kids, who value education, you know, these are positive influences on our community in Springfield, and any comment about that otherwise, I think, is hurtful and is not helpful to the city of Springfield and the people of Springfield.
All week, MAGA has been throwing stuff at the wall to try to explain how their God-Hero got completely outclassed by a Black woman he has claimed is “dumb as a rock“. So far I’ve heard:
It didn’t happen. Trump actually won. But apparently that story wasn’t convincing even in MAGA-World, so they also had to come up with explanations for Trump’s defeat.
The moderators were against him. It wasn’t fair to fact-check him more just because he lied more frequently and more outrageously than Harris. Moderators should have sat there stone-faced when Trump claimed babies are being executed after birth, immigrants in Ohio are eating dogs and cats, or that Trump was being “sarcastic” when he admitted that he had lost the 2020 election.
Kamala must have gotten the questions ahead of time. Obviously there is no way Harris could have anticipated that she would be asked about inflation, abortion, immigration …
Kamala’s earring was really an earphone. I suspect this claim is motivated by jealousy. Trump’s handlers wish he had been wearing an earphone, so they could have kept yelling “Forget about crowd sizes! Get back to inflation!”
Kamala was using witchcraft. Seriously. Lance Wallnau, the so-called “father of American Dominionism” detected the “occult empowered deception, manipulation, and domination” on Harris’ side, and believes that “something supernatural needs to disrupt this counterfeit momentum”. Clearly we need to throw her in a lake and see if she floats. This theory has one advantage over all the others: It explains why Trump floundered. (How could Harris knowing the questions cause Trump to sound like a raving lunatic?) But if Kamala is secretly the reincarnation of Marie Laveau — I can sort of see a resemblance — it all makes sense. He rambled and told outrageous lies not because he’s old and his brain never did work very well, but because she cast a spell of confusion on him. [BTW: MAGA really should thank me for doing that bit of historical research. If it catches on, we’ll know they read the Sift.]
Trump managed to pull a bunch of that together into this totally sane and rational Truth Social post:
ABC FAKE NEWS has been completely discredited, and is now under investigation. Did they give Comrade Kamala the questions? It was 3 on 1, but they were mentally challenged people, against one person of extraordinary genius. It wasn’t even close, as is now reflected in the polls. I WON THE DEBATE!
My favorite post-debate meme went something like: “No wonder Trump thinks Harris is a Marxist. She just publicly owned him.”
Trump has taken a lot of well-deserved ridicule for claiming to have only “concepts of a plan” on healthcare. (He’s been using that phrase at least since 2019.) Paul Krugman explains what’s going on here: The “phenomenal” healthcare plan Trump has been vaguely discussing since 2015 provides affordable coverage to all Americans. But there are really only two ways to do this:
The government insures people directly, as in Bernie’s Medicare for All proposal.
The government subsidizes private insurance, as in ObamaCare.
Trump has repeatedly said these options are both “disasters“, so he’s stuck. He can fantasize about having an all-singing all-dancing program that solves everybody’s problems. But there’s no way to flesh out that fantasy, so it never develops beyond a “concept”.
BTW: Trump’s “concepts of a plan” flashed me back to a party scene in “Annie Hall”, where you overhear some random guest saying: “Right now it’s only a notion, but I think I can get money to make it into a concept, and later turn it into an idea.”
We don’t know much yet. Sunday, Secret Service agents clearing the hole ahead of Trump spotted a gun barrel in the bushes. They engaged a man who ran away. Reportedly, shots were fired, but whether any were fired by the man in the bushes or just by the agents is unclear. Trump was unharmed. The man, a White American, is now in custody. He appears to be strongly pro-Ukraine, but it’s not clear whether that was his motive in stalking Trump.
Trump supporters online have been irresponsibly linking this apparent assassination attempt to the previous attempt, and blaming both on a mysterious “them”. Here’s Marjorie Taylor Greene:
They are trying to kill him!!! They will do anything to stop him from winning.
As a firmly anti-Trump liberal, let me say this: I don’t want him killed and I’m glad nothing came of this attempt. I want Trump discredited, not dead. I want to see him defeated in the election, and I want him to get fair trials on his indictments. If he does go to trial again, I will be rooting for him to be convicted and sentenced to jail. But I don’t want him killed. A Trump assassination would probably only unleash something worse on America.
and Laura Loomer
I’ve decided not to touch the rumors that Trump and Loomer are having an affair. Too often, when a woman rises to some form of prominence, hostile people claim she must be using sex somehow. It’s wrong when Trump says it about Harris, and it’s wrong here too.
But I don’t need to lose my PG-13 rating to criticize Loomer, or to criticize Trump for associating with her. Last week, Loomer responded to a Kamala Harris tweet celebrating her Indian grandparents with a blatantly racist post:
If @KamalaHarris wins, the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center and the American people will only be able to convey their feedback through a customer satisfaction survey at the end of the call that nobody will understand.
The Bulwark’s Sam Stein observed that if Republicans are worried about Trump being influenced by a conspiracy theorist, that ship sailed a long time ago. He provided a long list of Trump-promoted conspiracy theories going back to Vince Foster’s suicide and questioning whether Osama bin Laden had really been killed.
The problem isn’t Laura Loomer. She’s little different than all the other extremists who remain in Trump’s good graces by performing near-perfect sycophancy. The problem is precisely what Tim Walz warned: Trump’s narcissism and his ego make him weak, vulnerable to any person willing to use flattery to win their objectives. Trump’s aides are making the same argument Tim Walz is: that Trump doesn’t have the self-control to protect against extremists making him their ready tool.
and you also might be interested in …
Just in case you had any doubt that Trump takes everything personally, he posted “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT” to Truth Social Sunday morning. I love the response from never-Trump Republican Rick Wilson:
Invading Moscow in the winter, fighting a land war in Asia, and going up against the Swifties. These are well regarded as key strategic mistakes in history.
And speaking of Taylor, I am struck speechless by Elon Musk’s offer to “give you a child and guard your cats with my life”. Usually when I see some outrageous statement, I can imagine some situation or some state of mind where I might be tempted to say something similar. But I’ve got nothing here. I have no idea what Elon could have been thinking.
It is getting very difficult to determine which MAGA fiasco is supposed to be a distraction from the other MAGA fiascos.
and let’s close with something visual
Some while ago I did a closing featuring a Dad who photoshopped his kids. It seems he’s still at it. Here we see a demonstration of a basic principle of physics: Actions produce equal and opposite reactions.
This week everybody was talking about tomorrow night’s debate
I’m not going to say much about this because I’m trying not to think about it. It will happen, I can’t influence the outcome, and by Wednesday morning we’ll know how it went. Kamala Harris is smarter and sharper, but a shameless liar always has a puncher’s chance in these things, especially when moderators refuse to fact-check, as they did in the Trump-Biden debate.
Recent polls have Harris up nationally by 2.8%, according to the 538 polling average. Given the Electoral College’s thumb on the scale, that’s a toss-up. Hillary’s popular-vote margin of 2.1% wasn’t quite enough, but Biden’s 4.5% definitely was. Democrats hold a similar 2.6% edge in congressional generic ballot polls.
The Electoral College shames our country. Twice in this century, it has allowed the candidate who got the second-most votes to claim the presidency. People only support the Electoral College to rationalize the unfair advantage it gives their side. Can you imagine how Trump would scream if he got more votes than his opponent, but still lost the election?
I’ve decided not to do a state-of-the-race post until after the debate. But here’s Ruben Bolling’s account of the campaign so far.
and Russia, Russia, Russia
We all know that “the Big Lie” is Trump’s claim that he really won the 2020 election, and his victory was stolen from him by fraud. But a lie of similar size is his claim that “Russia, Russia, Russia” was a hoax cooked up by his enemies, and that investigations like the Mueller Report “cleared” him of wrongdoing. (This is covered in Chapter 1 of Steve Benen’s new book “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, reality, and the Republicans’ war on the recent past“.)
John Durham’s sham investigation of “the Russia hoax” went on longer than the Mueller investigation, and came up empty when juries quickly dismissed two prosecutions against minor characters in its conspiracy theory. The “crime of the century” Trump advertised was never revealed.
This week we got a reminder that Russia has never stopped trying to promote the American right wing. An indictment released Wednesday charges that the Russian state media company RT funneled $10 million through an American company (obviously Tenet Media, though the indictment does not name the company) to fund right-wing influencers online.
The people who ultimately got the money are all claiming they were duped, and had no idea Russia was funding their work. Author Renée DiResta observes:
Buying authentic influencers is a far better use of funds than creating fake personas, because they bring their own trusting audiences and are actually, you know, real.
The Democratic Mormon X-account Dem Saints notes “The irony of calling Kamala a communist while cashing Russian checks.”
and the Georgia school shooting
Wednesday, a 14-year-old brought an AR-type weapon to Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia and began shooting, killing four and wounding nine. He has been charged with murder and will be tried as an adult. His father faces manslaughter and other charges for providing the gun “with knowledge [his son] was a threat to himself and others.”
I’m not sure how I feel about either of those prosecuting decisions. No matter what he’s done, a 14-year-old is not an adult. And the father deserves consequences of some sort, but manslaughter seems a bit much. More punishment is not the solution to every problem.
Another Republican response came from Governor Kemp:
This is not the day to talk about safety or policy. We need thoughts and prayers for the victims, law enforcement, and educators.
For Kemp, it never is the day. Just two years ago, he signed a law that allows Georgians to carry handguns in public without a license or background check.
During my four years, nothing happened. And there was great pressure on me, having to do with guns. We did nothing.
This TikTok video is a very raw response from a Mom who says she takes pictures of her kids every day so she will know what they were wearing in case something happens. She contrasts Trump’s attention to imaginary issues like schools changing kids’ genders with his disinterest in actual problems like kids getting shot at school.
Former Missouri high school teacher (and one of my favorite Substack bloggers) Jess Piper describes how disturbing active shooter drills are for teachers, not to mention students.
I also know that kids who are stuck in the hallway during an active shooter event are left in the hallway. Every single police officer who conducted drills told us the same thing: if you have a student begging to get into your classroom, refuse them. They could be the shooter.
During one drill, complete with explosions and smoke in the hallway, someone pounded on her locked classroom door and begged to be let in. She followed instructions and did not open the door. Even though she knew it was a drill, she felt traumatized afterwards. (Fortunately this was a teachers-only drill with no students present.)
Piper lists the common-sense changes the vast majority of voters would like to see: universal background checks, safe storage laws, and red flag laws.
Those proposals run into the same objections gun-violence apologists always raise: They won’t stop every shooter. No solution is perfect, so we should do nothing.
If you’re willing to accept school shootings as a “fact of life” and think government should “do nothing” about them, you know how to vote. If you believe that it doesn’t have to be this way, you also know how to vote.
and the corporate media covering for Trump’s mental decline
That’s the subject of the featured post, introducing the term sanewashing, which has been around for a while, but whose usage has recently exploded.
and Trump’s legal cases
Judge Juan Merchan delayed sentencing Trump for his 34 felony convictions until after the election. Frustrating as this is, Politico’s Ankush Khardori explains the judge’s thinking.
The federal January 6 case is back in Judge Chutkan’s court, which now has to deal with the Supreme Court’s invention of presidential immunity. There are so many issues to sort out that we are still months or maybe even years away from trial, even if Trump doesn’t win the election and order the Justice Department to drop the charges. But between now and election day Chutkan may hold evidentiary hearings or request briefs that could allow Jack Smith to introduce evidence the public hasn’t seen yet.
Trump must think the E. Jean Carroll defamation cases (where juries found him responsible for sexual abuse and defamation, totaling up to nearly $90 million in damages) works in his favor politically, because he purposefully called attention to it Friday.
The appeals court can’t just substitute its own judgment for the jury’s, because the jury heard witness testimony live rather than reading it in a transcript. So who the jury decided to believe is not reviewable. What the appeal is about is whether the jury should have been allowed to hear one of the witnesses at all, or listen to the infamous Access Hollywood tape, where Trump confessed to doing in general the kind of thing Carroll accused him of specifically.
The witness in question supported Carroll’s case by testifying that Trump had groped her on an airplane, something he continues to deny. In his press statement, Trump did what he so often does, saying that the witness wasn’t attractive enough to assault.
Frankly, I know you’re going to say it’s a terrible thing to say, but it couldn’t have happened, it didn’t happen, and she wouldn’t have been the chosen one. She would not have been the chosen one.
“The chosen one” — as if it’s an honor, and women are lining up hoping that Trump will grope them. All I can say is: “What an asshole.” You can watch the video here; it looks and sounds just as bad as it reads.
I was going to write a summary of the Democrats’ best chance to retain the Senate, but I was going to say exactly what Jay Kuo says: It all comes down to Jon Tester winning in Montana and Debbie Mucarsel-Powell beating Rick Scott in Florida. Doing both probably keeps the 51-49 margin.
The knock on most renewable energy is that it’s unreliable; the sun isn’t always shining and the wind doesn’t always blow. The answer to that problem is battery storage. The Economist reports on the state of grid-scale batteries.
How fast climate change causes sea level to rise depends to a large extent on what is happening under the glaciers of Greenland — and nobody really knows.
It’s September and Republicans control the House, so it must be time to talk about a government shutdown. The issue House Republicans are pushing this time is to require proof of citizenship to register to vote.
That provision may sound reasonable if you don’t think about it too long — after all, we all want American elections to be decided by Americans. But basically it causes a problem without solving a problem.
It causes a problem because lots of legal American voters can’t easily produce proof of citizenship. In general, poor people have little incentive to get a passport, and Americans who have moved around a lot may have lost track of their birth certificates a few hops ago. (Again, there’s a socio-economic factor: If you’ve ever had to leave someplace in a hurry, taking all your important papers with you may not have been a priority.) You can probably go back to the county where you were born and pay a fee to get a new copy, but that’s a big enough hurdle to keep many people from voting — which may be the whole point.
As for the problem this idea is supposed to solve — noncitizens voting — it isn’t really a problem. Noncitizen voting is already illegal, and there is absolutely no evidence that significant numbers of noncitizens are voting (other than in local elections in cities that allow it). U.S. News summarizes:
Almost all available data says that noncitizen voting in federal elections, though not unprecedented, is incredibly rare.
In 2016, North Carolina audited its elections and found that 41 legal immigrants had cast ballots despite not yet being citizens out of 4.8 million votes cast. The state’s election board found that the votes made no difference in any state election.
Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger conducted an audit of the state’s voter rolls in 2022 and found that 1,634 had attempted to register but all were caught and none were actually registered.
In our nation’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump. He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He can never be trusted with power again
I still hold him responsible for the Bush administration’s torture policy and would like to see him tried at The Hague. But he’s right this time, and I appreciate him not including some poison pill in his endorsement. I couldn’t have made the point better.
The way the announcements are dribbling out makes me wonder if someone in the Harris campaign is orchestrating the timing. But apparently it’s not all leading up to George W. Bush, whose office says he won’t endorse anyone this year.
In case you still respect Elon Musk: On September 1, he retweeted (with the comment “Interesting observation.“) a totally wacko theory that only “high-status” or “high-T” men should have input into political decision-making. The justification is that “people who aren’t able to defend themselves physically” process everything through a “safety filter” and aren’t free to ask “Is this true?” The ideal is “Democratic, but a democracy only for those who are free to think.”
Maybe I’m having a low-T day, but I can’t remember ever considering the idea that testosterone might enhance rationality. There’s a reason why we talk about guys who “think with their dicks”. When the ancient Athenian playwright Sophocles got old and felt his libido waning, he compared it to being freed from a harsh master.
Oh I don’t know, I think that territory is actually very well charted.
The Economist edited, replacing “uncharted” with “dangerous”.
and let’s close with something tasty
Have a few thousand gallons of milk you need to do something with before they go bad? Maybe you too can take a run at the Guinness record for the largest ball of string cheese. The UPI story and the YouTube link disagree about the exact weight. (Was it 2200 pounds or just 1400 pounds? I think the YouTube link just did the kilogram/pound conversion wrong.) But it’s big. Sadly, the story doesn’t say whether anyone will get to eat it.
It was the labor movement that helped secure so much of what we take for granted today: the 40-hour work week, the minimum wage, family leave, health insurance, Social Security, Medicare, retirement plans. The cornerstones of middle-class security all bear the union label.
This week everybody was talking about Trump’s downward spiral
As I explained in the Teaser, I didn’t really set out to write two Trump articles this week. I planned the Georgia article, but then as the week went on, there was some new Trump outrage every single day. This summary was getting swamped with them, so I moved them all to their own article.
and the Harris interview
Wednesday night, CNN aired a much-ballyhooed interview (transcript, video parts 1, 2, 3) where Dana Bash asked questions and Kamala Harris and Tim Walz answered them. The Democratic ticket survived the interview without blundering, but overall the interview just underlined the point I was making two weeks ago: Mainstream political journalism is broken. Answering their stupid questions does nothing to serve the cause of democracy.
Bash spent the interview asking Harris and Walz to respond to baseless accusations Trump and Vance keep making. Basically, she was playing the role of the trouble-making gossips I knew in junior high. (“Do you know what Marcy is saying about you?”) I find myself agreeing with Jeff Tiedrich (who elaborated in more colorful language than I’m going to use here):
“Tim Walz lied about IVF” is a right-wing talking point. “Kamala Harris isn’t really Black” is a right-wing talking point.
pestering Democratic candidates about right-wing talking points is not journalism. it’s being a Republican tool.
The exchange that sums up the interview is this one:
BASH: Speaking of Republicans, I want to ask you about your opponent, Donald Trump. … He suggested that you happened to turn Black recently for political purposes, questioning a core part of your identity. HARRIS: Yeah. BASH: Any— HARRIS: Same old, tired playbook. Next question, please. (LAUGH) BASH: That’s it? HARRIS: That’s it.
Bash may have been surprised by Harris’ dismissal of her question, but did it deserve any lengthier answer? Like a junior-high gossip, wasn’t Bash angling for Harris to insult Trump in some way she could then carry back to him? (“Kamala Harris says you’re a racist. How do you respond to that?”)
Even the questions that sounded substantive really weren’t. For example, Bash started the interview with: “What would you do on Day 1?”
Day 1 is only interesting when there is a change in parties, because — unless the new president wants to be a dictator, as Trump has said he does — the only possible actions are executive orders that reverse the previous administration’s orders. So Biden’s Day 1 was significant because he
rejoined the Paris Climate Accords
reversed Trump’s Muslim ban
stopped construction on Trump’s border wall
reversed Trump’s moves to disengage from the World Health Organization.
Harris doesn’t have any similar night-and-day disagreements with Biden’s orders. Everything she has been talking about — restore the protections of Roe v Wade, safeguard voting rights, restore the child tax credit, build more affordable housing, subsidize first-time home buyers, shift some of the tax burden from the middle class to the very rich, pass the border bill Trump had his minions in Congress block, etc. — requires the cooperation of Congress, which isn’t going to get any of it done in one day.
Bash knows this, so why is she asking? To set up critical headlines, like Politico’s “Harris Dodged Questions About Her Day One Plans“. (Politico’s article went on to describe the dramatic actions five presidents took on Day 1. All five, of course, replaced presidents from the opposite party.)
How do maneuvers like this serve the voters, or democracy in general?
Asha Rangappa posts an interesting analysis of why Harris dismissed Bash’s turned-Black question, and how this tactic is driving Trump nuts.
Rangappa points to the Karpman Drama Triangle, which simplifies interpersonal conflicts down to three roles: persecutor, rescuer, and victim. From time to time Trump takes any of the roles, but his goal is always to wind up as the Victim, as in “I did everything right, and they indicted me.“
By saying “Next question, please”, Harris is refusing to strike back at Trump and give him something to play the Victim over.
In contrast to their criticism of Harris for avoiding interviews, the media often gives Trump credit for responding to questions. But they never ask him anything hard, like: “What were you planning to do with the classified documents you were keeping at Mar-a-Lago? And why did you tell the government you had given them all back when you hadn’t?”
They don’t ask such questions because they know what the response (which doesn’t qualify as an “answer”) would be: “That’s a nasty question. You’re the fake media.”
Let’s be honest: When Trump faces real questions, he never answers them. To this day, he hasn’t given a coherent response to the charges in any of his four indictments. (Instead, he attacks the prosecutors, the judges, the FBI, the witnesses, the jurors, and the Biden administration. He makes sweeping denials like “I did nothing wrong.” But he never addresses the evidence against him.) He complains that the media doesn’t tell his side of the story, but that’s because he has never settled on a single story to tell.
In view of all the stuff Trump has gotten away with (so far), I have to laugh at the attempt to drum up some Lilliputian Harris scandal. This week’s attempt: She claims she worked at McDonalds, but never listed it on a resume. Does anybody applying for a job after law school list their fast-food summer jobs on their resumes?
The media often digs into the nuts-and-bolts inside-baseball of campaigning — fund-raising, polls, ads, strategies — but presents a very naive view of governing. They want a detailed picture of a candidate’s policy proposals, as if presidents were kings who could simply decree those proposals into law.
That’s how you get questions like Bash’s “The steps that you’re talking about now, why haven’t you done them already?” A bunch of those “steps” — codifying Roe v Wade protections, passing the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, passing the border bill, restoring the child tax credit — have gone to Congress and been blocked by the House Republican majority. Others, like shifting the tax burden from the middle class to the billionaires, stand no chance of getting Republican support.
Every administration’s policies are a compromise between the president’s vision and what can get through Congress. Implicit in all of Harris’ proposals is the assumption that Democrats will hold the Senate and regain the majority in the House.
During its first two years, when it had slim Democratic majorities, the Biden/Harris administration managed to get done an amazing number of things — far more than Trump — like funding infrastructure (which Trump kept promising but never accomplished), and beginning to transition away from a fossil-fuel economy that is leading to a climate-change apocalypse (a transition Trump wants to reverse with a drill-baby-drill policy, which somehow will make bacon cheaper). But no, they weren’t able to implement the full Democratic change agenda. During the last two years, they have artfully kept MAGA nihilists in the House and Republican partisans on the Supreme Court from undoing all that progress, but they haven’t managed to push further.
In this environment, ten-step plans are beside the point. Voters need to understand the sharp contrast in the underlying values of the two parties.
Women have rights vs. wombs belong to the state.
Save the planet for future generations vs. drill-baby-drill.
Stand up for democracy vs. give in to Putin.
Focus policy on the middle class vs. cut billionaires’ taxes and wait for prosperity to trickle down.
Support the rule of law vs. let presidents commit crimes and become autocrats.
How many details do you need to pick a side?
and the hostages
Six more Israeli hostages were found dead in Gaza over the weekend. According to AP:
Three of the six hostages found dead — including an Israeli-American — were reportedly scheduled to be released in the first phase of a cease-fire proposal discussed in July.
The deaths sparked massive protests in Israel yesterday, with protesters charging that the Netanyahu government is not doing enough to get the remaining hostages returned. The nation’s largest union has announced a nationwide general strike to begin this morning.
The Biden administration perpetually claims to be on the verge of getting a hostages-for-ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas, but something always falls through at the last minute. Naturally, each side blames the other for not negotiating in good faith and not really wanting peace. It is difficult to criticize one side without seeming to endorse the other.
According to local authorities, more than 40,000 Palestinians have died as a result of the fighting in Gaza. It is never clear how many of them were Hamas warriors and how many were civilians in the wrong place at the wrong time.
and you also might be interested in …
I’ve been wondering for some while about the persistent charges that Democrats support “abortion after birth”. Since I’ve never seen a Democrat endorse the idea, or heard any examples of an after-birth abortions happening somewhere, I’ve assumed these are just lies.
But lies are usually based on something, even if reality has been grossly distorted by the time the claims get made. I think I’ve finally found the something in this case.
The law came in response to the prosecution of two Kings County women who were criminally charged after having miscarriages. Though charges in both cases were dismissed, one woman spent 16 months in jail and the other spent nearly four years. The Kings County District Attorney has vowed to bring new charges in one case, according to CalMatters. According to Wicks’ office, at least 1,300 people have been criminally prosecuted for having miscarriages, stillbirths or self-managed abortions in the last 20 years.
AB 2223 and its author drew heavy criticism from the conservative anti-abortion movement, with some organizations, such as the California Family Council, alleging that the bill would effectively decriminalize infanticide. That is not true. The law does prevent pregnant people from being criminally charged in the event that an infant dies due to pregnancy-related causes. It does not decriminalize the killing of infants.
So if a miscarriage or self-managed abortion results in a baby who is alive but fatally damaged, the woman can’t be charged if the baby dies from that damage.
Other states have since passed similar laws, resulting in the after-birth abortion rhetoric.
The dispute stems from X’s usefulness as a tool for spreading dangerous disinformation, like bad health advice or incitement to political violence. Brazil demanded that X block certain disinformation-spreading accounts, which Musk called “censorship” and refused to do.
I’m sure many other countries are also worried about X and disinformation, so they are watching to see how this plays out.
Back in the 2000 campaign, Republicans would sum up Bush’s charm advantage over Gore by asking which candidate you’d rather have a beer with (ignoring the fact that Bush was a recovering alcoholic who couldn’t drink any more). In 2024, I propose a different test: Who would you rather go to the state fair with?
and let’s close with something that takes training
Throwing out the first pitch is a longtime baseball ceremony that is typically used to call attention to some local celebrity or community leader. Some honorees wilt under the pressure of being watched by thousands, and bounce the ball to the plate or toss it so wide of the mark that it can’t be caught.
But Wednesday, Shohei Ohtani’s dog Decoy delivered a memorable first pitch for a game between Ohtani’s Dodgers and the Baltimore Orioles. With Shohei behind the plate, Decoy squatted on the pitching rubber waiting for the sign, then picked up the baseball with his mouth and delivered it directly to his master, dropping it onto home.
Shohei also had a good game, hitting a home run and stealing two bases.
This week everybody was talking about the Democratic Convention
The featured post focuses on how the DNC reclaimed Reagan-era values that Republicans have stopped taking seriously or have let drift away from American reality: freedom, family, marriage, tradition, masculinity, and what makes someone American.
I know I mentioned this in that post, but it deserves a second plug: One standard element of a political convention is the roll call of the states as the delegates announce their votes. The DNC did it a little differently from the RNC.
The DNC turned roll call into a dance party, with each state choosing music appropriate to itself, like Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” or Illinois choosing Alan Parson’s “Sirius”, the walk-on music the Chicago Bulls use when they play in that same arena. My own state, Massachusetts, picked the Dropkick Murphy’s “I’m Shipping Up to Boston”. But Georgia stole the show by getting Atlanta’s Lil Jon to perform his own “Turn Down for What”.
One difference between the conventions the featured post didn’t cover: The RNC’s message centered on hero-worship: America is in terrible shape, but if we elect Donald Trump again, he will save us. The DNC was more of a pep rally for activists. Speaker after speaker urged the delegates (and by extension those watching at home) to “do something”: volunteer for the campaign, send money, make sure your friends are registered to vote. Kamala Harris will not save us by herself; her campaign is the vehicle through which We the People will save ourselves and each other.
I’ve never seen condoms used for political advertising before.
Major media fact-checking during the conventions was somewhere between comical and infuriating.
If you’re a person actually interested in the truth, the main thing you need to know about the Democratic Convention speakers is that they were far and away more truthful than the Republican speakers. Nothing at the DNC rivaled the big lies that form the scaffolding for MAGA policies: the “migrant crime wave“, or that illegal immigrants are voting, or that other countries are emptying their jails and insane asylums to send their unwanted people to the US.
None of that is even remotely close to being true.
But both-sides-ism decrees that fact-checkers had to flag Democrats for something. So when Tim Walz said that “IVF and fertility treatments” are “personal for Gwen and I”, USA Today had to point out that the Walzes’ daughter Hope resulted from a different fertility treatment than IVF, as if IVF hadn’t been the next option, and as if succeeding before reaching that point would give the Walzes less empathy with infertile couples who do need IVF. In short: Nothing Tim said was wrong or needed correction.
Or when Pete Buttigieg said that “crime was higher on [Trump’s] watch”, USA Today found it important to point out that not all crime rates were higher all the time. So the murder rate (which rose under Trump) continued rising for Biden’s first year before falling to a level below where it was at the end of Trump’s term.
And when Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker said “Donald told us to inject bleach” as a Covid treatment, that was “misleading“, because Trump only made that ridiculous suggestion as something scientists should waste their time investigating.
Bill Clinton said that since the end of the Cold War, 50 million American jobs have been created under Democratic administrations and only 1 million under Republican administrations. PBS rated that only “mostly true“, because even though what Clinton said was exactly right, 1989 was a particularly fortuitous time to measure from. Starting the clock running somewhere else might give less lop-sided results.
Summing up: While Republicans told big whopping lies that they can’t justify their policies without, Democrats sometimes failed to include all the footnotes a journal article would require.
It seems like a conscientious fact-checker would want to note that distinction. But AP’s headlines looked like this:
Good lines from the convention that I haven’t found another place for. D. L. Hughley:
Republicans for Kamala? I guess Donald Trump will finally know what it’s like when you get left for a younger woman.
JD Vance said ‘if you don’t have kids you have no physical commitment to the future of this country.’ When I deployed to Afghanistan, I didn’t have kids then. Many of the men and women with me didn’t either. But let me tell you, our commitment to the future of this country was pretty damn physical.
We believe that a patient’s room is too small and cramped for space for a woman, her doctor, and the United States government. That’s too many people in the room.
On paper, this looks to favor Trump, but it also ratifies Harris/Walz framing: Trump, Vance, and Kennedy are all weird, so of course they would wind up together.
I’ve seen lots of triumphal posting by Trumpists, claiming that this is a big development that nails down Trump’s election. But Nate Silver is unconvinced. His model has Harris up 4% with her convention bounce just starting to show up in the data. Her margin drops about 0.3% when Kennedy is taken out.
and the horse race
I’m not going to pay much attention this week, because if Kamala gets a bounce out of the convention, it won’t show up fully in the polls until at least next week. But generally, her slow and steady momentum has continued. 538’s polling average has her up by 3.4%, which is close to where she needs to be to overcome the Republican advantage built into the Electoral College.
But there is reason to expect a convention bounce. Here, a CNN reporter is stunned that 6 of the 8 undecided voters he talked to in November have decided for Harris. One has decided for Trump and one still isn’t planning to vote.
and you also might be interested in …
Maybe “Communist” and “Marxist” don’t mean what Trumpists think they mean.
and let’s close with something cold-blooded
OK, I’ve heard of support dogs, cats, and even monkeys. But a support gator? I’m picturing a bumper sticker: My support animal can eat your support animal.
The Weekly Sift 