Over the last several years there’s been this kind of perversion that has taken place, which is to suggest that the measure of the strength of a leader is based on who you beat down, when what we know is the real and true measure of the strength of a leader is based on who you lift up.
This week everybody was talking about the Democratic Convention
The Democratic National Convention in Chicago has already started, if you count events that don’t usually get much coverage, like the delegate breakfasts. Main programming begins at 4 this afternoon, central daylight time. This livestream link begins at 5:30.
Politico has a good article about the convention, including the various ways you can watch it. The major networks are only committed to an hour of coverage 10-11 each night, but CSPAN and various streaming options should cover everything.
Tonight’s headliners are President Biden, who I expect to get a heartwarming reception from a party that appreciates what he has sacrificed for the greater good, and Hillary Clinton, who may finally see her dream of a female president realized this year. The Obamas will speak Tuesday. Wednesday’s lineup includes Tim Walz, Nancy Pelosi, Bill Clinton, and Pete Buttigieg, while Thursday belongs to Vice President Harris. Jason Carter at some point will appear on behalf of his grandfather Jimmy Carter, who is hoping to hang on long enough to vote for Harris in the general election.
This convention will contrast with the Republican Convention in a number of ways that I think will work in the Democrats’ favor. For one thing, the party is not running away from its past, and its nominee has the support of all its major stars. And while the RNC tended to be dour and dystopian, the DNC should be much lighter and joyful.
Also, the Democratic headliners are just better speakers. I expect that Walz on Wednesday and Harris on Thursday will each have a point and make it, in a speech that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. They should contrast well with Trump’s 90-minute ramble at the RNC, and whatever it was that J. D. Vance was doing.
The wild card in the week is how intense and disruptive pro-Palestinian protests will be.
and Ukraine’s invasion of Russia
On August 6, Ukraine flipped the script on Russia and sent its troops into Russian territory in the Kursk region, which is famous as the site of the largest tank battle in history. (The Russian victory over Germany at Stalingrad is considered the greatest single turning point in World War II, but Germany’s defeat on the Eastern Front didn’t become inevitable until after Kursk the next summer.)
It’s hard to know what this all means. A substantial fog of war prevents accurate reporting, but it’s clear that Russia was surprised and has not been able to repel Ukraine yet. The attack could turn out to be anything from a strategic masterstroke to a modern-day Gettysburg campaign that has early successes but ultimately hastens defeat.
In the meantime, it’s a substantial political embarrassment to Putin, whose image of strength is taking damage.
and Gaza
The dying continues in Gaza, and the Palestinian death count has now passed 40,000. The Biden administration continues to push for a ceasefire/hostage release deal, but it’s not clear that either side really wants peace.
and you also might be interested in …
It’s always hard to decide how much attention to pay to the latest Trump outrage. It’s important not to become desensitized to them, but they’ve been going on for nine years and haven’t ended his career yet.
Trump on Thursday, when talking about giving GOP donor Miriam Adelson the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s top civilian honor, said it is “actually, much better” than the Medal of Honor “because everyone (who) gets the congressional medal of honor, that’s soldiers. They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets, or they’re dead.”
Trump’s former Chief of Staff, former General John Kelly, responded:
No president, member of Congress, judge or political appointee — and certainly no recipient of the Presidential Medal — will ever be asked to give life or limb to protect the Constitution. The two awards cannot be compared in any way. Not even close.
Trump’s remarks would be bad enough in the context of a Medal of Freedom winner who saved many lives through peaceful means, like vaccine developer Jonas Salk, or who risked life and limb in a non-military context, like first man on the Moon Neil Armstrong. But it’s obscene to say such a thing while giving the award to Miriam Adelson, who essentially bought the honor by (with her late husband) contributing hundreds of millions to Republican candidates, including Trump himself.
I discussed Trump’s Mar-a-Lago press conference in detail in the featured post, and barely mentioned his interview with Elon Musk. CNN did a fact check, for what that’s worth. But their discussion of climate change is worth paying attention to, because it so clueless. Bill McKibben dubbed this “the dumbest climate conversation of all time”.
Trump said the same stupid thing he’s said before, which is that rising sea levels aren’t worth worrying about because you just wind up with “more seafront property”. Not only is this wrongheaded, it’s just plain dumb, as McKibben points out:
a rising ocean clearly reduces the amount of oceanfront property. If Florida goes underwater there will be a new stretch of seafront along what’s now the Georgia border—but the amount of oceanfront will be greatly reduced.
But most of the truly idiotic comments come from Musk, while Trump just sits there and seems to agree. Musk is pushing electric cars not because he worries about the climate, but because he worries about running out of oil. Also, he pictures increased CO2 in the atmosphere not causing any real problems until it gets around 1000 ppm (from it’s current level of just over 400), because that would cause breathing problems.
McKibben comments:
There is not a serious climate scientist on planet earth who has ever contemplated a thousand parts per million with anything less than panic and horror. … What Musk’s math implies, of course, is that we have endless time to deal with this crisis. If 1,000 is the danger level, and we’re going up two parts per million per year, that does indeed “give us quite a bit of time.” Three hundred years, roughly. … This is the point of their conversation, at least when it comes to climate. It is to insist that nothing need be done now, that we should just go on expanding the fossil fuel industry.
Social media is trolling Musk: “Elon Musk, dead at 52, says there is no need for misinformation laws”.
Sexism is sexism, even if it comes from a woman. I am appalled that the WaPo published a Kathleen Parker column including this:
Without her beauty, Harris might be joining Biden in retirement. All you have to do is imagine her spoken words coming from a less-attractive package. Or put her on radio.
Hillary wasn’t attractive enough. Kamala is too attractive to take seriously. There’s no winning.
Tim Walz hasn’t forgotten how to speak to a football team. Decades ago, politicians of both parties made these kinds of speeches all the time to promote civic virtues in the rising generations. But it’s been a long time since I’ve heard one.
The DeSantis takeover of New College in Sarasota hasn’t resulted in book burnings, but a lot of gender diversity books that students might have wanted are winding up in the dumpster
and let’s close with some resemblances
James Lucas posts a thread on X that celebrates pareidolia, “our brain’s tendency to see familiar shapes in random patterns”, like the Waterfall of the Bride in Peru.
No Sift next week. The next batch of new articles will post on August 19.
I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?
– Donald Trump
When prejudice cannot deny the black man’s ability, it denies his race.
This week everybody was talking about getting prisoners out of Russia
Thursday, President Biden announced a multi-country swap of prisoners that brought home three Americans: WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich, Paul Whelan, and Radio Free Europe journalist Alsu Kurmasheva. Whelan had been held the longest, since 2018.
The swap relied heavily on US allies. Germany, Slovenia, Estonia, Poland, Norway, and the Maldive Islands released prisoners Russia wanted back. In his announcement, Biden underlined the importance of having allies, a backhanded slap at Trump’s anti-NATO sentiments.
So when are they going to release the details of the prisoner swap with Russia? How many people do we get versus them? Are we also paying them cash?
At some point, questioning the details of the swap is legitimate. But surely the first reaction of any non-weird American was to be happy for fellow Americans who are free now, and for the families who can welcome them home. Trump expressed none of this, but (without knowing any of the details) simply assumed the deal must be bad because it worked against his political interests. He doubled down during his Atlanta rally Saturday.
I would like to congratulate Vladimir Putin for having made yet another great deal.
Didn’t every American other than Trump feel at least a little joy in their hearts for their freed countrymen? That’s the kind of thing that makes him weird.
Of course there’s speculation about what this means politically in the US. Back in May, Trump posted that he would get Evan Gershkovich released “almost immediately after the election”, and that Putin “will do that for me, but not for anyone else”. Some people at the time interpreted this as Putin’s ransom demand: If you want to get Gershkovich back, elect Trump.
[L]ike most world leaders, Putin has no doubt been reading the polls, and he may have concluded that Trump is not going to win … Therefore, Putin might have reasoned, it’s better to take a deal now so it looks as if he’s acting without an eye to our election.
However, I wonder if there’s another angle: Maybe our allies were willing to sacrifice more for Biden, in order to make it less likely Trump will ever be restored to power.
and Trump’s interview with Black journalists
That’s the topic of one featured post. A few related things didn’t make it into that article.
John McWhorter’s analysis of why Trump mispronounces “Kamala” is interesting. He relates it to previous generations of American mainlanders calling the 50th state “Ha-WHY-a” and its capital “Honolula”, or misnaming foreign foods “raviola” and “guacamala”.
The Trumpian attitude toward Harris’s Indian name reanimates an old American trope. Instead of opening up to a foreign word and even exploring it a little, Trump is treating it as an alien presence in need of assimilation, telling it to conform to whatever he decides it should be.
This willfully blasé attitude toward the word’s pronunciation has the effect of othering it, and Harris by extension. A name with no set pronunciation is alien, exotic, unplaceable — and therefore not who we are. It’s a subtle dig that aims in the same direction as Trump’s false rumor that Barack Obama wasn’t American.
A subtle detail in a scene from the recent movie American Fiction sums up something important about race in America. The main character, Thelonius “Monk” Ellison, is a Black author who doesn’t want to be defined by his blackness. (He wants to write literature, not Black literature.)
Early in the movie, he is coming out of an airport while talking on the phone to his agent about his unwillingness to write the stereotypic “Black novel” the market wants from him. “You know,” he says, “I don’t even believe in race.”
“Unfortunately,” his agent replies, “other people do.” And as he says that, a cab drives past Monk to pick up a White man.
A question White conservatives ask constantly is “Why do Blacks (or Democrats or liberals) make everything about race?” That scene is the answer: Black people may try to forget about race, but the world will remind them.
and J. D. Vance continues to embarrass Republicans
Outrageous things Vance has said continue to surface. In a 2021 interview on the Dear Ohio podcast of Spectrum News 1, while he was running in the Ohio Republican primary for the Senate seat he now holds, Vance was asked “Should a woman be forced to carry a child to term, after she has been a victim of incest or rape?” He replied:
I think the question betrays a certain presumption that’s wrong. It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term, it’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society. The question really, to me, is about the baby.
In other words, a woman should be forced to carry her rapist’s baby, but that’s an inconvenience. It’s not the important thing about the situation.Also, this requirement makes rape a viable reproductive strategy for men, but that’s not important either.
I noticed something in that interview that I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere: Vance repeatedly uses the word normal in a way that I find creepy. The first question is why he wanted to run for the Senate, and Vance says
I think normal people in this country, people who want to live a good life, who just want to raise their families, they deserve somebody who fights for them.
Normal comes up several times throughout the interview, and it always refers to people like Vance himself. I find myself wondering what percentage of the country Vance considers normal.
What I find so weird about this, and it reflects on the media more than it does on Simone Biles, is that we’ve tried to turn a very tragic moment — Simone Biles quitting the Olympic team — into this act of heroism. And I think it reflects pretty poorly on our sort of therapeutic society that we try to praise people not for moments of strength, not for moments of heroism, but for their weakest moments
Thiel made him wealthy, setting him up to invest in companies that became popular with the MAGA set. He shepherded Vance’s entry into politics, bankrolling, alongside other Silicon Valley donors, his successful bid for the U.S. Senate in 2022.
Liberalism is exhausted. One suspects that democracy, whatever that means, is exhausted. And we have to ask some questions very far outside the Overton Window.
Before passing that on, I felt obligated to search for the context. I found it here: an hour-and-a-half dialog with Tyler Cowen, who I don’t recognize. I haven’t looked at the whole thing, but the immediate context of the quote is a little better than it sounds. They’re discussing the German philosopher Carl Schmitt (who I also don’t recognize). He accurately predicted the fall of democracy in Germany, but “things went very haywire” (according the Thiel) when he got “somewhat entangled with the Nazis”. Thiel describes that entanglement as “bad judgment”.
So Thiel’s not openly espousing fascism in that quote, but I still can’t be comfortable electing the protege of someone who suspects democracy is exhausted. And my overall feeling is: God save us from billionaires who want to raise questions “very far outside the Overton Window”.
and the horse race
Who you think is ahead right now depends on which polling average you trust. They are all close, and they all show Harris gaining. RCP has Trump ahead 0.8% in a two-way race, down from 1.9% last week. In a five-way race (including RFK Jr., Jill Stein, and Cornell West), Harris is ahead by 0.2%. Nate Silver’s average has Harris up 1.4%; Trump was ahead by 0.4% a week ago. I could go on, but you get the idea.
Like everybody else, I’m wondering who Harris will pick as VP. But I don’t see much point in writing about it, because I’m sure the decision is already made and we’ll find out soon enough.
One striking thing about Donald Trump is that so many of the Trump administration veterans who know him best oppose his candidacy: Mike Pence, John Kelly, Jim Mattis, and many others.
Being accused of being weird has gotten under MAGA skins in a way that fascist and racist never did. And yet they keep acting weird.
Normal Americans find inspiration in the Olympics, and cheer for the great athletes who represent us: Simone Biles, Katy Ledecky, LeBron James, and many others. But Trumpers have a weirder reason to pay attention to the Olympics: They need something to get outraged about.
Look at what has gone viral in MAGA-Land: Anger at female Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, who defeated her Italian opponent in 46 seconds. Khelif was identified as female at birth and has never professed to be anything else, but she was disqualified from the 2023 world championships after the amount of testosterone in her blood exceeded some limit. The Olympics has different standards, which she fulfilled. She does not physically stand out from other women boxers, and is not the favorite to win the gold medal in her weight category.
But to Trump and his minions, Khelif is “trans”. Trump posted a video of Khelif’s bout with the comment:
It was a person that transitioned. He was a good male boxer.
If having more testosterone than the average woman makes you a man, then all those low-T men — you must have seen the TV commercials for supplements — are actually women.
More weirdness is the way that Trump cheers any bad news for America. Today, he’s glorying in the stock market plunge — even though the market is still much higher than when he left office. At the end of the day, check the value of your 401(k), and reflect on how happy Donald Trump is about your loss.
For reasons that defy explanation, Trump has been going after Georgia’s popular Republican Governor Brian Kemp, both on Truth Social and during his Atlanta rally Saturday night. But here’s the line that really slays me:
He should be seeking UNITY, not Retribution
Look back at my article on his convention speech, which was billed as a “unity” speech. The only unity Trump recognizes is submission to him.
It turns out that was a regular thing in her campaign, and not restricted to Indian people or Indian food: She’d go meet with supporters and cook something. “Cooking With Kamala” is a 7-video series on her YouTube channel. In this one, she visits the chair of her Iowa campaign and teaches her how to make apples with bacon. Kamala attributes the recipe to her mother, who must have picked it up after she came to America. (In the Mindy video, she says her grandmother was a strict vegetarian.)
She’d rather address, in the summer, a sorority — a colored sorority. Like she can’t get out of that.
This segment of Nicole Wallace’s show demonstrates what Harris candidacy means to Black people and especially Black women. Erin Haines describes Republican’s racist attacks on Harris as “a train that is never late”.
The segment replays part of a Harris interview:
So here’s the thing about breaking barriers. Breaking barriers does not mean that you start on one side of the barrier, and you end up on the other side. There’s a breaking involved. And when you break things you get cut. And you may bleed. And it is worth it every time.
Maya Wiley responds:
We have been cut. When she says that … we have lived that cut as students at Ivy League schools. We lived that cut when we were lawyers standing in front of a judge that said “Where’s the lawyer?”
And she calls out the sense of “victimization” Trump keeps appealing to:
People who are victimized by fairness. Who are victimized by competition from the competent. And who are upset because they have for so long gotten to be mediocre and rise.
The whole thing is worth watching.
and J. D. Vance
the subject of the other featured post. And I didn’t even get around to mentioning this weird conversation he had on a podcast in 2021. He claimed “a core part of what’s wrong with journalism in America” is that female reporters are panicking about their biological clocks running out. And then this:
they’re all fundamentally atheist or agnostic. They have no real value system.
Because to him the only values are Christian values. If you don’t have those values, you don’t have any values.
and Trump’s “You won’t have to vote any more”
A mistake journalists and pundits often make with Trump is to hear what he says and think: “He couldn’t possibly have meant that.” Then they search for some less threatening interpretation, and claim that’s what he must have really meant.
Well, this weekend I caught myself about to do the same thing. Friday, Trump spoke to Turning Point Action, a political group of right-wing “Christians” [About that: How much of the Sermon on the Mount would they reject as “woke”?] founded by Charlie Kirk. He said that Christians needed to get out and vote for him just this once.
You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.
That sure sounds like he’s confessing to exactly what his enemies charge: If he gets another term, democracy will be over in America. Nobody will have to vote any more.
But then I thought: No, he must not have meant that. He must be talking to Christians who usually ignore politics, telling them that they should make an exception this time. (Even that isn’t a very positive take: He’s pitching his message to people who think democracy is a burden; they should vote for him so they can slough off the chore of self-government.)
Marcy Wheeler traces how the NYT covered this speech: Its initial headline was about Trump calling Harris “a bum”. Only after the won’t-have-to-vote clip caught fire on social media did the NYT mention it — in paragraph 14, with the explanation I suggested above.
As he so often does, Trump wants it both ways on his failed assassination: He wants to brag about “taking a bullet for democracy”, but he doesn’t want to provide any transparency about his injuries. (In recent appearances, his ear looks fine.)
Predictably, the NYT completely ignored the transparency issue and did its own analysis to back up Trump’s claim about the bullet. The FBI later said more-or-less the same thing, though they left open whether he was hit by a whole bullet or just a fragment of one.
This is the result of Trump successfully working the refs: He has complained so loud for so long about “the fake news media” that the NYT is too intimidated to apply the standards every other politician is subject to.
Appallingly, the Times’ editorial board then framed transparency as a both-sides issue, and called on Harris to make the first moves: “she needs to do more, and she needs to do it quickly”.
Trump won’t release the real ER report on his injury, so somebody made one up. It’s fake, but I love it.
and Elon Musk
Elon had a bad week. On Tuesday, Tesla announced that its second-quarter earnings dropped 45% compared to last year. It was bad news in two ways: the number of cars sold was down 4.8%, and profit on each car dropped as well, as the company had to cut prices on some models. Tesla, which the market treats as a growth stock, saw its shares drop from around $250 to $225. Musk owns over 700 million shares, so his net worth went down nearly $18 billion. The shares still sell at over 60 times earnings (more than double the market average), so there’s still a long way to fall if growth doesn’t resume.
Musk’s personal image took yet another hit this week, as his 20-year-old trans daughter responded publicly to comments he had made about her Monday in an interview on Jordan Peterson’s podcast. Musk told Peterson that his “son” was “dead”, “killed by the woke mind virus”, and that Musk himself had been “tricked” into approving gender-affirming treatments.
I think he was under the assumption that I wasn’t going to say anything and I would just let this go unchallenged. Which I’m not going to do, because if you’re going to lie about me, like, blatantly to an audience of millions, I’m not just gonna let that slide.
Wilson, who had her name legally changed two years ago to disassociate herself from Musk, described him as “absent”, “cruel”, and “cold”. Looking at what he said, it’s hard to argue with her.
and you also might be interested in …
Last Sunday was the hottest day ever recorded on Earth. That record lasted until Monday. 2024 has consistently broken temperature-on-this-date records, and now that we’re getting into the hottest part of the year it’s breaking all-time records.
Jess Piper, who writes the blog “The View from Rural Missouri“, which I have linked to in the past, got swatted on Tuesday. One of her posts had drawn the ire of Libs of TikTok, which Wikipedia defines as “a handle for various far-right and anti-LGBT social-media accounts operated by Chaya Raichik”. A few days later (a correlation whose causality is impossible to prove), a deputy sheriff interrupted her gardening to inform her that the sheriff’s office, and several other law enforcement entities in the area, had received an email. The local water department had gotten a letter.
The email claimed to be from a close family relation. The letter stated that the family member had murdered me and my husband the night before. It went on to state that they intended to shoot and kill anyone who came on the property.
Needless to say, Jess was fine, and so was everyone else in her household. The point of a hoax like this is to provoke police to come into the situation with guns blazing, and maybe kill the unsuspecting target or her loved ones. Failing at that, the person being swatted should be terrorized, maybe so terrorized that she’ll stop doing, saying, or writing things that far-right or anti-LGBT people find offensive.
It might have worked, but for the fact that Jess really does live in rural Missouri, where local authorities know most of the long-term residents. So the deputy sheriff decided to drop in on his neighbor rather than call in a SWAT team.
It sounds like the terrorizing part of the plan didn’t work either.
In the end, this is the time in which we live. The internet has allowed me to find a following with like-minded people. It’s allowed me to organize across the state and remind people that folks like me exist in rural spaces. A whole lot of us live here and it’s getting out. We are contesting more rural seats and this will lead to more Democratic wins in my state.
But, with the good comes the bad. I have folks threaten me on a regular basis and now it has escalated to a swatting. But, I can’t bend to fear and I can’t stop the momentum we are building. So, I move on. We move on.
We lock arms. We do this together. I could not organize without support.
Friends and Fellow-Citizens: The period for a new election of a citizen to administer the executive government of the United States being not far distant, and the time actually arrived when your thoughts must be employed in designating the person who is to be clothed with that important trust, it appears to me proper, especially as it may conduce to a more distinct expression of the public voice, that I should now apprise you of the resolution I have formed, to decline being considered among the number of those out of whom a choice is to be made.
This week everybody was talking about Joe Biden’s decision
Yesterday, Joe Biden announced that he is ending his candidacy, but will continue as president to the end of his term. He endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to take his place. He promises to make a formal address to the nation later this week. (He’s been in Delaware recovering from Covid. I suspect he wants to be more recovered and back in the White House before he makes the address.)
I have a million reactions, but let’s start with this: Can you imagine Donald Trump ever, under any circumstances, doing something that selfless? Despite the pressures brought to bear on him, if Biden had stood his ground, he would not have been denied the Democratic nomination. And despite all the recent pessimism, the fall election was still virtually a toss-up. Polling averages had Biden around 3% behind, which is not much at this stage, especially considering how late-deciding voters broke for the Democrats in 2022. So he is giving up a very real chance to continue as president for another four years.
But that scenario also includes a substantial risk of Trump being elected again, which would be a disaster for this country. So Biden is stepping aside. As historian Jon Meacham wrote in today’s NYT:
By surrendering the possibility of enduring in the seat of ultimate power, Mr. Biden has taught us a landmark lesson in patriotism, humility and wisdom.
Trump could never do that. He showed on January 6 that he would risk pulling the whole country down around him in order to stay in power.
Then we come to Kamala Harris. Biden has endorsed her, and so have a few key Democrats like Rep. James Clyburn. More importantly, none of the frequently mentioned competitors has stepped up to challenge her.
The media is spinning all kinds of theories about the process for choosing a nominee, and salivating over the prospect of the first contested convention in many years. But I refuse to speculate until some major candidate other than Harris steps forward. For weeks we’ve been comparing Biden to Somebody Else, and that kind of conversation needs to stop. If you can’t identify who Somebody Else is and point me to the place where they have announced their candidacy, I don’t want to hear it.
The Democratic Convention starts in Chicago on August 19. A “virtual vote” was supposed to happen sometime in early August, because of an Ohio deadline that could have kept the Democratic nominee off that state’s ballot. But Ohio has since changed its rules, so that’s not necessary any more. That vote, though, has neither been scheduled nor called off, so we’ll see what happens.
These are maddening times to watch the news networks, because we all want to know what’s going to happen, but nobody can tell us. So the airwaves are full of speculation that is mostly baseless. I advise ignoring it: Tune in occasionally to see if there’s any actual news, but turn the TV off as soon as the talking heads start speculating. You’ll be happier and saner.
Also ignore the polls for at least a week. Harris-as-candidate will poll differently from Harris-as-possibility. Maybe better, maybe worse. (I notice myself feeling more excited about her than I thought I would.) Wait and see.
A few speculations are worthwhile: anticipating attacks on Harris, as Judd Legum and Kat Abu do. Abu’s take is particularly interesting: She thinks the Right has wasted four years when it could have been assembling a supervillain image of Harris, a la Hillary Clinton. Instead, they’ve just painted her as ditzy, which definitely should make swing voters see her as the lesser-of-evils compared to Trump. They’ll undoubtedly try to paint a new supervillain image of her, but it won’t penetrate as well as it would have if it had been marinating for four years.
Dueling ads are already out: an attack ad against Harris blaming her for covering up Biden’s shortcomings, and a pro-Harris ad billing her as “the anti-Trump”. “She prosecuted sex predators. He is one.”
Donald Trump and [Trump campaign adviser] Chris LaCivita are about to hit Kamala Harris with an avalanche of racist and sexist attacks and a ton of slut-shaming. Democrats across the board need to be saying now what we all know, which is that this will bring out the very worst of Trump. Racism and sexism are his brand. Charlottesville is his brand. You can’t just be on the receiving end of this stuff. Trump is about to show the kind of gutter white nationalist and racist pol he is. Force the press and all observers to see this totally predictable move through that prism. … Of course Trump will go there, and these attacks and those attacks can be very damaging. But Trump the racist bully and gangster is what kills him in the suburbs. It’s what embarrasses people.
One thing Biden’s decision does is put the too-old-to-be-president shoe on the other foot. Trump is 78, which means that in four years he’ll be older than Biden is now. Unlike Biden, he’s fat, out of shape, and eats a lot of junk food. Like Biden, his mental acuity is dubious. His proposed VP is 39 and has been a senator for a year and a half, during which he has accomplished essentially nothing. That VP, who very well could be president soon if Trump wins, has no other experience in public office.
So, say Biden stepped aside in favor of Harris tomorrow. How long until the vapid gossips we call political reporters find something wrong with her, some alleged flaw they just have to write 192 stories about? … About 30 f’ing seconds, is my guess.
The NYT in particular is worth watching. It has been running a dedicated campaign to push Biden out since … I don’t know, around March at the very latest. Will they be happy now? Will they finally start covering Trump’s inadequacies with the intensity they deserve? Or will they wait a week or so and then go after Harris just as hard as they went after Biden?
and the Republican Convention
The Republican Convention in Milwaukee just ended on Thursday, but it already seems like very old news. The featured post discusses Trump’s record-long acceptance speech, which was billed as a call for national unity. The media has been describing it as two speeches at war with each other: a unity call followed by Trump’s usual divisive rhetoric.
But I think they’re missing something: What Trump means by “unity” is that his opponents give up and submit to his domination. Once you understand that, the two halves of the speech fit together perfectly: He will be a president “for all America” as soon as all Americans shut up and get in line behind him.
I love Elon Musk. … We have to make life good for our smart people, and he’s as smart as you get. But Elon endorsed me the other day. And I read … [that] he gives me $45 million a month.
That’s how it works in TrumpWorld. He’ll be “committed to the working man” until that man’s boss writes him a check.
It is no wonder that the heroes who stormed Normandy and faced down communism sadly say they don’t recognize our country any more.
All over America, US History teachers were covering their faces and shaking their heads. The heroes who stormed Normandy were fighting Nazis. The Communists were our allies in that war.
Guilfoyle’s historical rewrite got me wondering: Do Republicans even recognize any more that the Nazis were the bad guys? Present-day Nazis are MAGA now, so the idea that Americans could have been fighting them in World War II seems unthinkable. Near the end of Trump’s speech, he recalled glorious past battles from our history: “Yorktown, Gettysburg, and Midway”. Midway, a battle against the Japanese, not the Nazis. By itself, it’s a trivial thing, but the pattern seems worrisome.
and the Trump shooting
When I wrote last week’s blog, the shooting was still too new for there to be many reportable facts. There had been a shooting and Trump got hit, but he was OK. A few other people were wounded and one had died. The shooter, a 20-year-old White guy, was also dead. That was pretty much it.
Now we know a bit more: Trump was barely injured at all. His ear wound didn’t even require stitches. The ear bandages his cultists wore at the convention reminded me of the purple-heart band-aids Republican conventioneers wore in 2004, to minimize John Kerry’s war wounds. Then they were trying to make something serious look trivial; this time they wanted something trivial to look serious.
A lot of investigating has happened since last week, but nothing has come out that fits into a convenient narrative. The shooter was into guns, and had some vaguely conservative views, but wasn’t particularly active politically. The lack of obvious hostility towards Trump
has left authorities puzzled about a motive for his assault and has had investigators speculating that his intentions may have been less politically motivated and more about attacking the highest-profile target near him. … In addition to the former president, Crooks had searched online about President Joe Biden and had photos on his phone of other prominent figures from both parties. He searched for the location of Trump’s rally as well as the upcoming Democratic National Convention, the briefing notes say, and discovered that Trump planned to appear just an hour’s drive away from his home in the Pittsburgh suburbs. That suggests Crooks may have been looking to carry out a high-profile shooting, and the Trump event’s proximity and timing offered the most accessible opportunity, federal officials have speculated.
When an act of violence doesn’t lend itself to a clear argument or a tidy story, we often choose not to think about it.
and J. D. Vance
To my surprise, I discover I have a public record when it comes to J. D. Vance: In 2016 I reviewed Hillbilly Elegy for UU World magazine as part of a batch of white-working-class books.
Vance and I are both from what I like to call the “transitional class” — people who grew up working class but got an education and are professional class now. (I became a mathematician while Vance became a lawyer.) Though we went different ways both politically and religiously, I thought Vance’s book was a credible account of how a transitional class person might become a social and religious conservative:
Realizing how close he came to having no one who cared about him, he values traditional notions of duty—holding a marriage together, taking responsibility for children—over individual fulfillment. His feelings about government come not from the military or the state university that helped him, but from the foster care system that he feared would take him from his grandmother and give him to strangers. When as a teenager he reconnected with his father, he found a man who had converted to conservative Christianity and established a new family blessedly free from drinking, daily screaming arguments, and violence. Vance’s adult religion, though conservative, seems to be less about theology or salvation than about the hope of establishing such islands of peace and sanity in an unstable world.
As for who Vance has become since, I turn to two men of his generation also from the center of the country: Pete Buttigieg and Trae Crowder. “I knew a lot of guys like J. D. Vance,” Pete says in his trademark blunt-but-not-nasty style.
When I got to Harvard I found a lot of people like him, who would say whatever they needed to to get ahead. And five years ago that seemed like being the anti-Trump Republican, so that’s what he was. … Five years later, the way he gets ahead is that [Trump]’s the greatest guy since sliced bread.
Pete compares Vance to Mike Pence, who similarly started out with one set of principles — Evangelical Christian moral rectitude — and then spent down his credibility making excuses for Trump’s immoral behavior. Pete notes how that ended “with Trump supporters proposing that he be hanged for using the one shred of integrity he still had to stand up to an attempt to overthrow the government”. Pete expresses his hope that things work out better for Vance “maybe not as a politician, but as a human being”.
As for why Silicon Valley billionaires support J. D. Vance (Peter Thiel is Vance’s biggest political donor) and Trump (Elon Musk is giving millions to Trump’s SuperPAC) in spite of otherwise being pro-science, anti-climate-change, pro-gay-rights, and libertarian rather than authoritarian, Pete says:
We’ve made it way too complicated. It’s actually super-simple. These are very rich men who have decided to back the Republican Party that tends to do good things for very rich men.
Trae Crowder, the “liberal redneck”, is even less generous, seeing Vance as someone who has sold out the people they both claim to represent. His rant is entertaining, and more fun to watch than to read.
and you also might be interested in …
A half-written article that keeps slipping from week to week as more urgent news erupts is “The Mythical Trump Economy”, about nostalgia for pre-Covid America, which fundamentally has nothing to do with Trump or his policies. In the meantime, look at the WaPo’s “Trump’s Economy vs. Biden’s in 17 Charts“.
I also still haven’t found time to read Judge Cannon’s dismissal of the stolen-documents charges against Trump, the most obviously open-and-shut case against him. Here’s the analysis on Law Dork:
It’s a weak-on-the-law ruling for which Chief Justice John Roberts deserves a not insignificant amount of blame — despite his name not appearing once in her 93-page opinion.
Roberts has led the Supreme Court into an era in which precedent can selectively be ignored, eviscerated, or overruled when it gets in the way of conservatives’ goals. That, in turn, has led lower court judges to feel that they have been given power to do the same — predicting, in essence, the precedents that they believe the current court would ignore.
This is not how the law is to work. And yet, one need only glance through Cannon’s decision to see that reality at work Monday in her effort to do Trump’s bidding.
We know from studies of authoritarianism that the more despondent and despairing people are, the more they become dependent on the promises of a savior, someone who’s going to save the nation. They become prone to accepting conspiracy theories. They don’t know what’s true any more, so they need an anchor, and that anchor would be Trump. So be very wary when you hear these slogans designed to discredit democracy and designed to convince people that America is failing.
We asked RNC attendees when America was last “great.” Regardless of age, most said when they were children. Says nothing about America, but lots about conservative psychology.
A Salon newsletter article fleshes this out:
As one commenter on Tik Tok aptly noted: “I’m amazed at the grown men who don’t understand that life was simpler when they were children because they were children.”
and let’s close with something fake
Sometimes you just can’t let the facts get in the way of a good story. When a flaw in a Crowdstrike security update crashed Microsoft systems around the world, somebody created a fake image of the Blue Screen of Death filling the Las Vegas Sphere. Snopes declared the rumor false.
Yes. I know: Mr. Biden is old, is prone to gaffes, walks stiffly and had a disastrous debate with Mr. Trump. But this I also know: A presidential election is not an entertainment contest. It does not begin or end with a 90-minute debate. Enough! Mr. Biden may not be the ideal candidate, but he will be the candidate and should be the candidate. And with an effective campaign that speaks to the needs of working families, he will not only defeat Mr. Trump but beat him badly. It’s time for Democrats to stop the bickering and nit-picking.
This week everybody was talking about the Trump shooting
I assume you already know that somebody shot at Trump during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on Saturday. They hit his ear, but did him no lasting damage. The shooter was killed and so was one other person; two were critically injured. The shooter has been identified, and everybody is wondering how he established a position so close to the stage. Officials aren’t speculating about his motives yet, so I won’t either. Sometimes assassins have coherent political agendas, but sometimes what they do only makes sense in their own inner worlds. Wait and see.
There is a fairly standard statement that any responsible leader needs to make in this situation, and Joe Biden made it:
I have been briefed on the shooting at Donald Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania. I’m grateful to hear that he’s safe and doing well. I’m praying for him and his family and for all those who were at the rally, as we await further information. Jill and I are grateful to the Secret Service for getting him to safety. There’s no place for this kind of violence in America. We must unite as one nation to condemn it.
As one whose family has been the victim of political violence, I know firsthand that political violence of any kind has no place in our society. I thank God that former President Trump is safe. As we learn more details about this horrifying incident, let us pray that all those in attendance at the former President’s rally today are unharmed.
I’ve decided not to speculate about the shooter, his motives, or the possible effects on the presidential campaign. For the most part, I find myself agreeing with Jay Kuo, especially his expectation that Trump and his cult will “overplay their hand”. There’s already an attempt to cash in.
One possible result of the shooting is pressure on Democrats to tone down their attacks on Trump, which I would hate to see. I understand why President Biden said in his televised address:
The political rhetoric in this country has gotten very heated. It’s time to cool it down. And we all have a responsibility to do that.
But of course we know what will happen: Trump will continue his violent rhetoric, and the media will call Biden a hypocrite any time he criticizes Trump, no matter how justified that criticism is. Rick Perlstein posted:
A predictable effect of the Trump shooting that the Republicans have worked the refs by saying that this is what happens when you say their candidate means to end democracy. This plays to agenda-setting elite political journalists” cult of consensus–for their immediate response was to cluck about “politicized” responses, when the only politicized response were from Republicans (Democrats who went on the record also responded with consensus cliches).
Republicans thus are already succeeding in neutralizing the perceived legitimacy of Democrats continuing to make the true argument that the Republican candidate does mean to end democracy.
Nobody is addressing the elephant in the room, which is the temptation almost everybody feels to get violent, if only in fantasy. That’s what one featured post is about.
and Democrats were still arguing about Biden’s candidacy
Whatever you believed last week, this week proved you right. Biden kept a busy schedule, did a lot of the things his critics said he needed to do, and did them well but not perfectly. He hosted the NATO summit, held an hour-long press conference afterwards, and had enthusiastic rallies, including a fiery speech in Michigan in which he both went on offense against Trump and laid out his vision for a second term. Last night he addressed the nation about the Trump shooting. (This morning I can’t find any articles about what he said, so he must have done fine.)
If you support Biden, you noted that his press conference (on foreign policy, mostly) displayed a depth of understanding we have never seen in a Trump press conference. He not only answered the questions directly, with detail and nuance, but recognized the individual reporters and made reference to their fields of expertise. If you want him out of the race, you noted that he sometimes said one word when he meant another (“Vice President Trump“), spoke in his characteristic interrupting-himself style, and wasn’t particularly charismatic. It was all too little too late.
There are polls to support both points of view. 85% of Americans told an ABC poll that he’s too old to be president and 65% want him to step aside. But the same poll found showed Biden within 1% of Trump, and a Marist poll has Biden up by 2%, belying the often-repeated claim that Biden “can’t win”, or that he needs some drastically different strategy that he still hasn’t announced. 538’s prediction model (which includes “fundamental” factors I don’t fully understand in addition to polling) has Biden as a slight favorite.
Prominent Democrats continued to pick sides. AOC and Bernie Sanders are all in for Biden, but the number of congressional Democrats expressing doubts about his candidacy (or even outright calling for him to quit the race) is over a dozen now. Nancy Pelosi made an enigmatic statement about supporting whatever decision Biden makes, as if his announced resolve to stay in the race wasn’t his final answer.
Whichever side of this argument you’re on, you’re probably annoyed that Trump doesn’t get similar scrutiny. He never holds unscripted press conferences, only does interviews with friendly journalists who won’t fact-check him or ask difficult follow-ups, hasn’t released his medical records, and makes constant verbal blunders that the media calls no attention to. His bizarre rambling at public rallies is covered as Trump-being-Trump rather than medically significant symptoms.
If Trump did hold the kind of press conference Biden held Thursday, we know what we’d see, because we saw it so many times when he was president: Before long a reporter would ask him about something he didn’t know, and he would respond with a word salad containing numerous falsehoods. Any follow-up question would trigger Trump to call the reporter “a disgrace” working for “the fake news media”. Headlines and sound bytes from the conference would be all about Trump sparring with reporters rather than anything we learned from his answers.
More and more I feel like the media is covering itself rather than external events. Thursday, NYT analyst Peter Baker sort-of covered Biden’s NATO press conference, but never actually got to the content of Biden’s words, focusing instead on “every momentary flub, every verbal miscue” which “even if quickly corrected, now takes on outsize importance” because
The reality is that every public appearance between now and November will be scrutinized for evidence of infirmity.
Scrutinized by who? Well, by Peter Baker, for one. He’s not reporting on events, he’s announcing his intentions.
Similarly, I can’t count all the headlines that have described Biden as “defiant” when he says he won’t drop out of the race. But who is he defying, exactly? Mostly the very same pundits who now tag him as “defiant”.
The NYT (where else?) provides Daniel Schlozman a platform to explain how the Democratic Convention can do whatever it wants, independent of what happened in the primaries. He notes that the Biden delegates are “pledged, not bound“.
I realize that in the shadow of Project 2025, the long-term consequences of a bad precedent may seem small. But this kind of hair-splitting can’t help but devalue the primaries going forward. Progressives should consider how this could come back to bite them.
Imagine that in 2028 or 2032, AOC pulls off some early primary upsets, gets momentum, and by summer is headed to the convention with a majority of delegates pledged-but-not-bound to support her. Unfortunately, polls show her losing to some MAGA successor like J.D. Vance or Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has been making hay by tarring AOC with the “socialist” and “radical Marxist” labels. Meanwhile, some Democratic centrist who didn’t even run in the primaries — let’s say Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, who the Republicans haven’t bothered to smear yet — has better numbers. The Biden 2024 precedent would open the possibility of pushing AOC out, in spite of what the primary voters wanted.
In my opinion, the dumbest idea around is to remove Biden via the 25th Amendment, as was proposed in The New Yorker by Jeannie Suk Gersen. Of course she’d prefer that Biden resign voluntarily — not just step down as nominee, but leave the presidency immediately.
But if Biden resists either an outright resignation or a break for the rest of his term under the Twenty-fifth Amendment, then it would be time to look to Section Four of the Amendment, which covers removing the President involuntarily. The Vice-President and a majority of the Cabinet can declare that Biden “is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” whereupon Harris would become the acting President.
Aside from the objection that this will never happen, there are two very good reasons why it shouldn’t. First, the 25th Amendment isn’t about the president polling badly, or worries about his abilities four years from now. It requires the VP and the cabinet to affirm that right now Biden is “unable to discharge the duties of his office”. The example that everybody was talking about when the amendment was passed in 1967 was Woodrow Wilson’s stroke, after which his wife Edith secretly ran the country.
Is there any evidence that Biden is incapacitated in the way the Amendment envisions? We just saw Biden host a NATO summit, which seemed to all outward appearances to go well; the alliance is united and taking decisive action to aid Ukraine. Inflation was actually negative in June. The economy continues to create jobs, and even as the unemployment rate ticks upwards to 4.1%, it remains remarkably low for this point in the interest-rate cycle. The stock market is at an all-time high. Biden has successfully negotiated with an insane Republican majority in the House, and has managed to keep the government open without giving up the gains he made (bipartisan infrastructure, the anti-climate-change provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act …) when he had a Democratic House majority.
So independent of any policy disagreement (on issues like the border, say, if you’re conservative, or Gaza if you’re liberal) where’s the evidence that the US is being mismanaged because Biden is unable to discharge his duties? You and I were never appointed to any office by Biden and owe him nothing, but could you sign a declaration to Congress affirming that he’s incapable at this very moment? I couldn’t. Using the 25th Amendment this way would set a terrible precedent.
But there’s an even more serious problem, which is that once Harris is sworn in, there’s no VP. So if anything happens to Harris Mike Johnson becomes president.
I know, I know: the Amendment makes provision for that:
Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.
So Harris can nominate Gavin Newsom or Beshear or some other White guy who could maintain the ticket’s racial and gender balance. But then we’re back to that insane Republican House majority, which would love to see Mike Johnson become president. Even if a handful of Republicans were willing to cross party lines, what if Johnson just adjourned the House without voting on the VP nomination?
So in the meantime, and probably until January, Johnson is next in line to be president. It would be an open invitation for some Christian nationalist nutjob to kill Harris. And if you think things like that don’t happen any more, take a look at Donald Trump’s ear.
and the Republican convention
It started yesterday in Milwaukee. I try to avoid speculation on this blog, but I’ve been expecting for months that this convention isn’t going to help them. Most of the country discounts what a freak show the MAGA Republican Party has become, and I expect the Marjorie Taylor Greenes and Matt Gaetzes to be out in such force that the country can’t ignore them. Most Americans haven’t watched a complete Trump speech in four years, and I expect them to be surprised.
See the point made above about Trump overplaying his post-assassination-attempt hand.
Pundits are settling on J. D. Vance as Trump’s VP, which fits the model I laid out some while ago. Trump’s VP has to have
no moral code, so that his conscience won’t keep him from doing whatever Trump asks (like Mike Pence’s did)
no independent following, so that he never outshines Trump (as Marjorie Taylor Greene might among the true MAGA faithful)
no prominence prior to Trump, so that he owes Trump everything (which eliminates Marco Rubio).
but I’ve been re-reading a book
Three of them, actually: Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, which is practically a time-trip to the late 1600s and early 1700s. Why is that worth mentioning here? Among many other things, Stephenson draws a strikingly simple line that divides Whigs from Tories: Tories believe that wealth comes from land, and Whigs believe that wealth comes from commerce.
Once you understand that, you see that generations later it was also the difference between two seminal American founders — Jefferson and Hamilton. In Jefferson’s ideal country, every family owned its own small farm. If you look at things that way, merchants and bankers — Hamilton’s people — seem like parasites.
The Hamilton/Jefferson argument is still with us, though you have to look at everything sideways to see it: If you think wealth comes from land (and the modern assets comparable to land, like brands, intellectual property or anything else you might charge rents or royalties for), government has no natural role in the economy. (It can’t create land, after all.) But if you think wealth comes from commerce, government can increase national wealth by building up the infrastructure of commerce: transportation systems, communication systems, education systems, and so on.
So if you dimly remember something in your high school US History class about Andrew Jackson fighting the Bank of the United States, that’s what it was about: Does a reliable banking system play a role in generating wealth, or does it just suck money away from the common people? And if you run into somebody who thinks government can only “redistribute” wealth that it has no role in producing, channeling it from “makers” to “takers”, you’re hearing the latest round in an argument that is more than 300 years old.
and you also might be interested in …
This morning, Judge Cannon dismissed the classified documents case against President Trump, the most open-and-shut of the cases against him. She wrote a 93-page opinion, which I haven’t looked at yet. Marcy Wheeler is reading it, and the Lawfare blog will have a podcast on it this afternoon.
Based on nothing but intuition, I think this is a good thing, because it opens the possibility that her decision will get reversed and the case can be assigned to a judge who isn’t in Trump’s pocket.
When the Supreme Court’s Loper decision came down two weeks ago, redefining the relationship between federal agencies and the courts, it was a little hard to describe what exactly it would mean in people’s lives. Fortunately, the Public Notice blog has an article listing the cases that are already being affected.
Taken together, it’s evident that any moves the administration makes to tilt the playing field even slightly in favor of workers are designed to fail once they reach a conservative federal judge. And thanks to right-wing judge shopping, plaintiffs are often able to get their case in front of an anti-regulation judge they know will be favorable to their challenges.
Friday, Maine Senator Susan Collins told reporters she won’t vote for Donald Trump.
Now imagine what a media storm there would be if Maine’s other senator, Angus King, announced that he wouldn’t vote for Biden. The event and the hypothetical event sound nearly the same, but clearly I’m missing something.
Rudy Giuliani’s attempt to use bankruptcy to get out of his $150 million defamation judgment isn’t going to work. Citing his lack of “financial transparency”, a New York judge dismissed his bankruptcy case. Next stop: asset seizure.
I love photo contests, and BigPicture has a great one. The photo below is called “Ghosts of the North”, and I was sure it must violate the rules by superimposing one image on another. But in fact it just has a long time exposure. The wolf was there long enough to register, but not long enough to look solid.
If my colleagues on this side of the chamber actually think that President Trump committed a criminal offense, and let’s understand, a high crime is a felony, and a misdemeanor is a misdemeanor. The words haven’t changed that much over time. After he’s out of office, you go and arrest him.
– Bruce Castor, lawyer defending Donald Trump against impeachment Opening Statement, February 9, 2021
In sum, the majority today endorses an expansive vision of Presidential immunity that was never recognized by the Founders, any sitting President, the Executive Branch, or even President Trump’s lawyers, until now. Settled understandings of the Constitution are of little use to the majority in this case, and so it ignores them.
I also want to compliment everybody involved in last week’s comments, particularly the discussion of Biden’s candidacy in response to “They Both Lost. What Now?” Commenters disagreed a lot, both with me and with each other, but by and large the discussion stayed civil. We’re all trying to save the Republic from autocracy; we just disagree on the best way to do it.
This week everybody should have been talking about the immunity decision
I cover this in the first featured post. Summary: It’s not the end of the Republic yet, but could be a significant step in that direction. The fact that the law will no longer constrain presidents just underlines the importance of electing presidents we can trust not to abuse their power.
but we actually talked constantly about Biden’s health and candidacy
The substance of what I think about Biden and his candidacy is in the second featured post: He is doing a good job and I still believe he can keep doing it. But settling down the media storm that has blown up requires political skills I don’t think he has. So I am open to choosing a new candidate, but skeptical that this move will solve the problem.
Late in that post, I discuss just how out of control the mainstream media has gotten. I was originally planning to write a whole article on that, but managed to cover most of what I wanted to say in the article mentioned above. Here’s the stuff that didn’t make it into that article:
One day this week, I fired up my iPad’s NYT app and noticed that the first six articles on the screen all had something to do with getting Biden out of the race. (Aaron Rupar noticed the same phenomenon.) All week, I kept checking CNN to see how they were covering the immunity decision, but I could never time it right: They were constantly talking about Biden’s fitness for office and whether his support was eroding. In one segment I watched, Host Jim Sciutto raised those issues with CNN commentator Van Jones, pro-Biden Republican Adam Kinzinger, and Democrats Howard Dean and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. Whenever any of the four expressed support for Biden, Sciutto argued with them. No pro-Biden point could go unchallenged.
There’s an agenda here, and it’s not subtle.
This kind of sustained assault doesn’t happen to Republicans. Republican scandals and pseudo-scandals last for a day or two and then go away. Donald Trump is still a convicted felon who tried to stay in power through force and fraud after he lost the election. Clarence Thomas is still blatantly corrupt. How often do those facts come up? Republican officials can appear on CNN without being asked about them.
But if you raise those comparisons, big-media journalists will protest, “We can’t keep asking people the same questions over and over again.” The Biden example, however, proves that they can. They’re doing it right now. They just can’t do it to Republicans.
The Republican Party in general is graded on a curve, but Trump especially. They’ve normalized his buffoonish bigotry. If you watched American news coverage, you would have no idea that Trump often threatens violence, promises to weaponize the DOJ against his “enemies,” is a felon, has been found liable for rape, tried to overturn an election, and incited an insurrection, among other things. If Biden is replaced, all of the coverage will be centered on the dysfunction of the Democratic Party.
AngryStaffer brings back some 2016 memories I had forgotten. We all remember how the NYT and other media blew Hillary’s emails into some big scandal. But do you remember when Hillary’s health was also supposed to be a big problem, one that should push her out of the race? Of course, it’s eight years later now and Hillary is doing fine.
In the featured post, I raise the possibility that replacing Biden will just move the attack to the new candidate. One reason to think so is the essay the NYT published on (of all days) July 4: “Why I Don’t Vote and Maybe You Shouldn’t Either“. If you click the link, you’ll see a toned down headline “Why I Won’t Vote”. There’s a reason for that. @capitolhunters did a deep dive into the author, one Matthew Walther, whose hairstyle and moustache looks more like Hitler than can be a coincidence.
After a big public outrage about an article denigrating voting on July 4, the Times shortened the title to “Why I Don’t Vote”. But then it turned out that records show Walther did vote in 2020 and 2022, so it got changed again to “Why I Won’t Vote”.
But anyway, what’s the editor’s motive in running this dishonest piece? Isn’t it to suppress the youth vote, which any Democrat (Biden or not) will need in November?
and the Fourth of July
When I talk to people these days, I often hear the fantasy of going into a Rip Van Winkle sleep and not waking up until after the election. This week in particular my social media feed included a lot of mournful posts revolving around the theme of this being the last real Fourth of July, the last honest holiday of American freedom and democracy.
I don’t necessarily believe that, but it’s a possibility, and I understand why people are taking it seriously. But let me pass on some wisdom I picked up many years ago when I thought my wife was going to die. (She didn’t.) If you’re afraid you’re about to lose something, appreciate it now.
So if we’re really seeing the last gasp of American democracy, don’t waste this time moping or wishing you were asleep. If you’re worried that these might be the last days of freedom, don’t miss them. Get out there and be free. Whatever “freedom” means to you personally, whatever activities you find meaningful that some authoritarian might try to stop you from doing, go do those things. Do them exuberantly and with joy.
and the France and UK elections
Counter to what this cartoonist (and a lot of other people) expected, the big winner in France’s parliamentary election was the Left, not the Right. The right-wing National Rally (RN) party was leading in the first round of the elections, but ended up finishing third in the final round.
The first round eliminates all candidates who fail to win the support of 12.5% of locally registered voters. Anyone who scores more than 50% of the vote with a turnout of at least a quarter of the local electorate wins automatically. The second round is a series of run-offs fought either by two, three or sometimes four candidates.
RN came out of the first round with 33% of the vote, compared to the left-wing New Popular Front’s 28% and 20% for President Macron’s centrist bloc. After that result, RN was expected to be the largest party in Parliament, if not winning an actual majority of seats. But instead:
The surprise result for the leftwing New Popular Front – which won 182 seats, followed by president Emmanuel Macron’s centrist Together alliance on 163 and the far right in third with 143 seats – showed the strength of tactical voting against Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN). The far right and its allies had forged a commanding lead in the first round but were ultimately held back by massive tactical voting to prevent them winning enough seats to form a government. …
More than 200 candidates from the left and centre had pulled out of the second round last week in order to avoid splitting the vote against the RN. Those parties had called on voters to choose any candidate against the RN, in an attempt to prevent the far right winning an absolute majority and forming a government.
No party wound up with a majority, so forming a government could take some time. New Popular Front is already a cumbersome union of leftist parties, so holding them together and adding support from centrists might be tricky.
Meanwhile in the UK, the Tories are out of power for the first time since 2010. Labour won in a landslide and Keir Starmer will be the new prime minister. At least two factors are at work here: the general unpopularity of anybody who was in power during Covid (which hits both Biden and Trump here), plus the Britain-specific factor that Brexit has turned into a nightmare.
and you also might be interested in …
You can tell something is losing popularity when Trump denies knowing anything about it. This week, he tried to distance himself from Project 2025, the plan produced by a consortium of conservative organizations to guide his second term.
Ok, let’s all play with Stupid for minute…so exactly how do you “disagree” with something you “know nothing about” or “have no idea” who is behind, saying or doing the thing you disagree with?
Here’s why Project 2025 matters: Trump is not a detail guy. We saw that in his first term. He said he wanted a tax cut, but he knows bupkis about taxes, other than how to avoid them. So Paul Ryan had to write his plan. He said he wanted a “beautiful” health care plan to replace ObamaCare, but he knows nothing about healthcare either, so the Republican Congress ended up just barely failing to repeal ObamaCare without any replacement plan.
He hasn’t changed or learned much of anything, so if he’s going to have any policies during a second term, somebody else is going to have to create them. That’s Project 2025.
Florida’s law allowing “volunteer chaplains” from outside organizations to provide counseling services in public schools took effect this week, and the Satanic Temple announced that it was ready to participate in any district that started such a program. So far none have. The Guardian article says this about the church’s beliefs:
The Satanic Temple champions Satan not as a literal, omnipresent demon, but as a symbol of rebellion and resistance to authoritarianism.
I may not be all that in touch with today’s high school students, but in my day “rebellion and resistance to authoritarianism” was the de facto religion of a large majority.
If you’re not from corn country (I am, originally) you might not find the length of this article worth your time, but Chris Jones’ Iowa-based blog The Swine Republic has an insightful essay “Mr. Peabody’s Corn Train” comparing Iowa’s infatuation with corn-based ethanol to West Virginia’s infatuation with coal. The West Virginia situation is further along, so it’s more obvious what a bad decision the state made tying itself to a doomed energy industry. [Footnote for people younger than me: The title derives from an old song lyric. It’s quite evocative if you catch the reference.]
Dozens of self-proclaimed white nationalists marched through downtown Nashville on Saturday. They wore matching uniforms, with ski masks and sunglasses to obscure their faces, and carried Confederate and upside-down American flags. Witnesses say they chanted the Nazi “Seig Heil” salute and called for mass deportations of nonwhite people.
[OK, it’s actually “Sieg Heil”, but don’t ask how I know that.] You might expect “Should I denounce Nazis?” to be one of the easiest questions in politics. But if you’re a Tennessee Republican it seems to require considerable thought.
As of Sunday morning, Gov. Bill Lee had not released a statement. U.S. Senators Bill Hagerty and Marsha Blackburn, as well as Nashville’s three congressmen, have also remained silent.
Nashville itself is Democratic, but due to gerrymandering all three of its representatives are Republicans. The only Democrat Tennessee sends to Congress is Steve Cohen from the Memphis area.
and let’s close with something timeworn
Kueez collects a bunch of photos showing the long-term effects of small but persistent processes. Cat scratches can completely destroy a banister eventually. If people play an organ for over a century, their fingers wear dips into the keys. And here, a family photo kept inside the cover of this watch eventually imprinted on the metal.
In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopaedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON’T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.
– Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
One issue in this campaign is whether the country was better off four years ago. To refresh your memory, here’s a meme from April, 2020.
Scott Dworkin is keeping a list of Republicans who are not supporting Trump.
It’s way too soon for this kind of humor, but here’s Andy Borowitz:
There are some compelling arguments for replacing Joe with Hunter. You could still use BIDEN ‘24 campaign regalia. He’s a generation younger. And the fact that he’s a convicted felon could attract Republican voters.
and the Supreme Court
Having delayed to the very end of the term, the Supreme Court is about to post its decision on Trump’s immunity claim. I’ll punt my analysis until next week.
Oklahoma is suddenly a central battleground for church-and-state issues. This week saw one effort to shore up the wall between the two, and another to blow a hole in it.
The Oklahoma Supreme Court defended the wall: It ruled 6-2 that the state’s charter school program can’t support an openly Catholic school.
Article 2, Section 5: No public money or property shall ever be appropriated, applied, donated, or used, directly or indirectly, for the use, benefit, or support of any sect, church, denomination, or system of religion, or for the use, benefit, or support of any priest, preacher, minister, or other religious teacher or dignitary, or sectarian institution as such.
Provisions shall be made for the establishment and maintenance of a system of public schools, which shall be open to all the children of the state and free from sectarian control
Nonetheless, two Catholic institutions got together to create St. Isidore, which they pitched as a virtual charter school to be supported by the state. The majority opinion summarizes:
The Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa applied to the Charter School Board to establish St. Isidore, a religious virtual charter school. St. Isidore does not dispute that it is a religious institution. Its purpose is “[t]o create, establish, and operate” the school as a Catholic school. Specifically, it plans to derive ‘its original characteristics and its structure as a genuine instrument of the church” and participate “in the evangelizing mission of the church.”
Despite the state constitution, the Oklahoma Charter School Board accepted St. Isidore’s application by a 3-2 vote, and made a contract to fund the school that would have begun today.
The argument on the other side, which a dissent spells out, is something you’re likely to hear again — possibly when the sponsoring dioceses appeal to the US Supreme Court: St. Isidore isn’t a “public school” per se, it’s a private organization contracting to provide a service (i.e., education) to the state. It shouldn’t be banned from competing for state contracts just because it’s a religious organization. It’s like a Catholic hospital providing medical services to Medicare patients.
Six justices weren’t impressed with that argument, mainly because of that “participate in the evangelizing mission of the church”. A Catholic hospital isn’t trying to make good Catholics out of its patients, but St. Isidore would be trying to make good Catholics out of its students. That may or may not be a worthy goal, but State of Oklahoma shouldn’t be paying for it.
In a state board of education meeting on Thursday, state superintendent of public instruction Ryan Walters announced a new memo “that every school district will adhere to, which is that every teacher, every classroom in the state will have a Bible in the classroom and will be teaching from the Bible in the classroom to ensure that this historical understanding is there for every student in the state of Oklahoma in accordance with our academic standards and state law”.
You can see Walters’ statement in the video of the meeting. Don’t be intimidated by the nearly-six-hour meeting length. Walters’ comments happen early: Around the seven minute mark, he says he will challenge the Oklahoma Supreme Court’s St. Isidore decision “all the way to the Supreme Court”. He then goes on to make his comments about teaching the Bible in all classrooms, because of its historical significance for “the Constitution and the birth of our country”. He’s done by the ten-minute mark.
My comment: Christianity does have a lot of historical significance for the US, both for good and ill. But if we’re going to be focusing on that in classrooms, I think we also need to teach about the constant religious strife in England during the 1600s, as Catholics, Anglicans, and dissenters (i.e., Oliver Cromwell) fought for control of the government. This was the English version of the continental Thirty Years War, in which battles between Protestants and Catholics killed millions and depopulated parts of Germany by 50% or more.
The Founders knew that history and didn’t want similar wars of religion to erupt here. Hence the Establishment Clause of the Constitution, which Jefferson summarized with the metaphor of a “wall of separation” between Church and State. Saying to the various denominations: “You can compete in all sorts of ways, but the government is off limits” was a very astute piece of statecraft.
In contrast to making kids learn the Bible, South Carolina has taken the opposite tack: Don’t let them read anything else. The Department of Education’s new regulation mandates that all books in classrooms or school libraries be “age appropriate” and not describe “sexual conduct”. Any parent of public-school students can challenge up to five titles a month, and a state board is the decision-maker rather than any local authority. Those phrases sound fine, but the problem is their vagueness: Librarians who don’t want to keep defending their choices to the state will self-censor all books about sexuality or race, including many that some students would benefit from reading.
For reasons no one seems to be able to explain, the legislature didn’t discuss this during the standard 120-day vetting period for new regulations, so it took effect Tuesday.
And there’s always Louisiana:
and you also might be interested in …
My wife recently asked me if there was anything good happening in the world, so I pointed to this: California’s shift to renewable energy is starting to show some serious results. Bill McKibben elaborates:
Something approaching a miracle has been taking place in California this spring. Beginning in early March, for some portion of almost every day, a combination of solar, wind, geothermal, and hydropower has been producing more than a hundred per cent of the state’s demand for electricity. Some afternoons, solar panels alone have produced more power than the state uses. And, at night, large utility-scale batteries that have been installed during the past few years are often the single largest source of supply to the grid—sending the excess power stored up during the afternoon back out to consumers across the state.
I mean, it’s encouraging when some island in Denmark replaces fossil fuels with wind power … but California!
Another good thing happening: Violent crime is falling. One good example comes from liberal Massachusetts.
Boston’s murder tally was already low. The city had 70 homicides in 2010 and 56 in 2020; last year, there were 37.
So far this year: 4.
Steve Bannon (a.k.a. inmate #05635-509) is supposed to start his four-month jail term for contempt of Congress today. Depending on how vindictive you’re feeling at the moment, that also might lift your spirits.
Before he gets out, he’ll have to stand trial on something else: defrauding contributors to the We Build the Wall campaign. Let me suggest a defense he might try: No harm was done, because people who would give to a cause like that, headed by someone like him, are so stupid they would have lost their money somehow anyway.
and let’s close with something big
Depending on your mood, astronomy can either depressing or uplifting. Maybe it makes you feel insignificant, or maybe it makes your troubles seem insignificant. It’s a Rorschach test.
This photo, pieced together from some number of Webb telescope images, is 340 light years across.
If your version of Christianity wants to put the Ten Commandments in schools but take free lunch out of them, you are worshipping something other than Jesus.
This week everybody was talking about the upcoming debate
So Biden and Trump are scheduled to debate Thursday night on CNN. I am resisting the temptation to do something I often criticize the cable-news talking heads for: speculate. We shouldn’t waste our time trying to predict how the debate will go, because in a few days it will happen and we can see.
I will say this: I think the existence of a debate works in Biden’s favor. The biggest reason I am optimistic about Biden’s chances in general is that the Trump campaign is based on lies: that Biden is senile, the economy is bad, crime is soaring, immigrants are responsible for that soaring crime, we were all better off four years ago, and so on. (CNN found 30 lies in Trump’s speech in Wisconsin Tuesday.) Anything that can get voters focused on reality — like what the candidates are actually like when you watch them live — works in Biden’s favor.
Having had time to mull over his insane sharks-and-batteries story, Trump tells it again, notes that he was criticized for it, and concludes: “It’s actually not crazy. It’s sort of a smart story, right?”
Biden continues to creep upward in the polls, and currently has a small lead in the 538 polling average. The average includes a Fox News poll from Wednesday, which has Biden up 50-48.
I have been skeptical of the polls that showed Biden behind, and I remain skeptical as he seems to pull ahead (by far less than the margin of error). The trend probably means something, but not the margins.
With even Fox News now acknowledging that Biden is pulling ahead, who’s writing the big think piece about how Trump should gracefully bow out at the RNC for a younger, fresher candidate?
But of course, you would know nothing about Biden’s momentum from the NYT, which publishes only bad news about Biden’s candidacy. Friday’s story on the campaign was about how Trump is catching up in fund-raising.
Oddly, there seems to be no actual news development that occasioned this article. The FEC has not released any new totals, but the NYT is basing its article on claims made by the campaigns, trusting the Trump campaign to tell it honest numbers. The article also accepts the Trump campaign’s claim that they are catching up due to small online contributions, and doesn’t mention the $50 million check Trump’s super-PAC got from billionaire Timothy Mellon.
The New Yorker does focus on such big-ticket donations, and makes this comment:
Trump’s fund-raising efforts have included brazen solicitation of donations from individuals and business interests that have big stakes in regulatory decisions. Last month, the Washington Post reported on an April meeting that Trump had at his Mar-a-Lago estate with senior executives from the energy industry. According to the Post story, Trump said that if he was reëlected he would reverse Biden Administration policies that have restricted oil and gas drilling in the Arctic and frozen export permits for liquefied natural gas. In pressing the energy executives to donate to his campaign, he told them that “(g)iving $1 billion would be a ‘deal’ . . . because of the taxation and regulation they would avoid.”
Little in this campaign is more laughable than the repeated videos of Trump waving to no one, as if a huge crowd were there to greet him.
and the Supreme Court
The featured post covers the Rahimi decision. On the surface it doesn’t sound like a big deal, because the Court does the right thing by an 8-1 margin. But five of the six conservative justices recognize that the Bruen decision has caused a mess, and they have to figure out how to fix it within the bounds of their originalist dogma.
Still no word on when we might hear an opinion on Trump’s absurd claim of absolute immunity from prosecution. Whether the Court grants his request or not, they’ve already delayed his January 6 trial by more than six months, which was what he wanted.
and Louisiana
So Louisiana has decided to waste a bunch of court time and lawyer fees so that it can be told to remove the Ten Commandments from its classrooms. This is part of a post-Dobbs push in the red states that amounts to: “Since precedent doesn’t matter any more, let’s try stuff that is obviously unconstitutional and see if this Court will OK it.”
Supporters of the law, in defending the measure, have leaned on the 2022 US Supreme Court decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, which gave a high school football coach his job back after he was disciplined over a controversy involving prayer on the field. The Supreme Court ruled that the coach’s prayers amounted to private speech, protected by the First Amendment, and could not be restricted by the school district.
The decision lowered the bar between church and state in an opinion that legal experts predicted would allow more religious expression in public spaces. At the time, the court clarified that a government entity does not necessarily violate the establishment clause by permitting religious expression in public.
But of course, here the state isn’t “permitting” religious expression, it’s mandating religious expression. Not even this Supreme Court will go for that. And the case they’re leaning on was a travesty to begin with.
Anyway, it’s just so typical: politicians making a show of their Christianity by doing some symbolic thing that costs them nothing and helps no one. “These people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.” – Isaiah 29:13.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz contrasts public schools feeding hungry children (as Minnesota does) versus forcing state-sponsored religion on them.
I’m a two-decade school teacher. We know that full bellies make better learners. But look, you’re seeing the contrast in this when you get a Democratic governor versus a Republican governor. We don’t have the Ten Commandments posted in our classrooms, but we have free breakfast and lunch. Those are policies the Biden-Harris administration is talking about taking national. It makes a huge difference.
and Willie Mays and Reggie Jackson
Thursday, a major league baseball game was played in a town without a major league team: Birmingham, Alabama. The point of the game was to honor the Negro Leagues, and it also turned into a spontaneous tribute to the great Willie Mays, who had died two days before.
Prior to the game, the usual Fox Sports announcer crew interviewed another Black Hall of Fame player, Reggie Jackson. Reggie comes from the generation after Mays (entering the major leagues in the middle of the 1967 season, 16 years after Mays’ rookie year and 20 years after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier), and so is not usually thought of as a pioneer. But he had a lot to say about the racism he faced while playing for the minor league Birmingham A’s in 1967.
His story is worth the three minutes it will take you to listen to it, because it underlines a point that is often glossed over in upbeat accounts of our civil rights progress, particularly in this age when any honest testimony about American racism is denounced as “critical race theory”: Racism isn’t something you beat once and then are done with. Twenty years after Jackie Robinson, racism against Black baseball players was still virulent.
Joe and Sharon Rudi, I slept on their couch three-four nights a week for about a month and a half. Finally they were threatened that they would burn our apartment complex down unless I got out. …
Had it not been for my White friends … I would have never made it. I was too physically violent. I was ready to physically fight somebody. I’da got killed here, because I woulda beat someone’s ass, and you’da saw me in an oak tree somewhere.
and you also might be interested in
This week it was hot in the Northeast, but that was nothing compared with Mecca, which hit 125 degrees (51.8 C). Saudi sources estimate that at least 1300 people died during this year’s Hajj.
Pastor Robert Morris, founder of the Gateway Church in Southlake, Texas (ranked in 2023 as the 9th largest church in the US) resigned Tuesday after the “extramarital relationship” from early in his career that he had previously confessed to turned out to be the multi-year abuse of a 12-year-old girl.
Morris, a former member of President Donald Trump’s spiritual advisory committee, had long told a story to his congregation and church leaders about a “moral failure” involving sexual sin when he was a young minister in his 20s.
Last week, Cindy Clemishire, now 54, revealed in a post on the church watchdog site The Wartburg Watch that she was 12 when Morris first sexually abused her in 1982. The alleged abuse continued for more than four years, Clemishire told NBC News on Monday.
If the mention of Southlake rings a bell, it might be because two weeks ago I told you about Mike Hixenbaugh’s book They Came for the Schools, which describes the campaign to remove “critical race theory” and so-called LGBTQ “groomers” from the Southlake schools. I didn’t talk about Morris and Gateway’s role in that campaign, but in a 2023 podcast, Hixenbaugh described how Morris and Gateway campaigned for conservative candidates to take over the school board. To protect the children, of course.
Hardly any Democrat communicates better than Pete Buttigieg. Here, he explains why conservatives’ lack of answers on questions like gas prices, prescription drug prices, inflation in general, infrastructure, child care, and taxes (Rick Scott wants to raise taxes on the poor), leads them to their current rhetoric.
So what do they do? They find somebody vulnerable and pick on them — which at the moment is largely the trans community. And they find something to talk about that can go between the laughable — is Donald Duck going to make your kid gay? — to the incredibly dark, which is the suggestion that the very presence of someone who is gender-nonconforming or trans or gay or lesbian or otherwise different — the very existence of someone like that is an “adult subject”. That if my kids in, let’s say, the first grade classroom were to mention in passing that over the weekend they had a great time going with their dads to the zoo, that they would have somehow, by saying that, uttered something age inappropriate. And get us really fired up about that fight.
and let’s close with something fictitious
The environmentalist website Grist did something creative: sponsored a “climate fiction” contest. Contestants were challenged to “imagine 2200” and “offer vivid, hope-filled, diverse visions of climate progress”. From over a thousand entries, the judges chose three winners and nine finalists. You can read the stories here.
The featured post covers the Supreme Court’s ruling on the mifepristone case and the bump-stock ban, as well as a district court ruling overturning Florida’s ban on gender-affirming care.
In this situation, President Biden has done something Trump has never been able to conceive of: He has drawn a line between his personal life and his role as president. He loves and supports Hunter the way a Dad should. But as president, he stayed out of Hunter’s case, and he’s not going to give Hunter a pardon.
Trump was never able to compartmentalize the presidency like this. Presidential power was his power, to use for whatever purpose he desired. If he liked somebody, or needed to repay them for their silence, he pardoned them, regardless of the merits. Rod Blagojevich, for example, got his sentence commuted because he’d been a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice.
Much of southern Florida flooded this week as up to two feet of rain fell in places like North Miami. But of course, Governor DeSantis is not going to admit that climate change played any role.
This clearly is not unprecedented. I think the difference is, you compare 50 to 100 years ago to now, there’s just a lot more that’s been developed, so there’s a lot more effects that this type of event can have.
The brouhaha over how to characterize the storm came a month after DeSantis signed a bill that removes most references to climate change in state law. The legislation, which is set to take effect July 1, eliminates climate change as a priority in making energy policy decisions, even though Florida routinely faces threats from extreme heat, deadly hurricanes and toxic algae blooms.
… The storm arrived 14 months after another “rain bomb” hit South Florida, dropping 22.5 inches on Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport in one day. Last year’s storm knocked the city’s main hospital offline for all but emergency procedures, shorted electrical equipment at City Hall and left thousands of travelers stranded.
Both that system and this week’s deluge bear the fingerprint of human-caused climate change. In a warmer world, the atmosphere can hold more moisture. That means rainfall rates are getting heavier and extremes are becoming more common.
This week, most of the Eastern US is going to roast under a “heat dome”. But if all you want to say is “It gets hot in summer”, nobody can make you see any larger significance.
and fake videos that “show” President Biden’s senility
This cycle’s version of Hillary’s emails or Obama’s birth certificate is the supposed “evidence” that Joe Biden is too old to be president. This week the Republican National Committee released two videos that were picked up by Republican media outlets like the New York Post, and were widely shared on social media. Both seemed to show President Biden being “out of it” during public events. One of these apparent incidents made the New York Post’s cover.
In reality, both videos were carefully edited so that what Biden was reacting to was out of the frame, making it appear as if the President were off in a world of his own. The Washington Post’s fact checker compared these videos to the same events from other angles and wider perspectives — views that were also available to right-wing outlets that chose to ignore them — and awarded the videos four Pinocchios, its rating for the most extreme dishonesty.
In one video, the RNC’s version has Biden apparently wandering off during an outdoor photo op for G-7 leaders in Italy, only to be brought back to the group by the Italian prime minister. Outside the frame, but clearly visible in other videos of the same event, is the parachutist Biden had turned to pay attention to, giving him a thumbs-up and exchanging a few words. (As part of the festivities, skydivers had floated down with the flags of the seven nations.) This video, in fact, shows Biden exercising one of his trademark virtues: acknowledging the contributions of people who aren’t at his world-leader rank.
In another RNC-edited video, Biden stands still while all the people around him dance during a Juneteenth celebration. A conservative UK newspaper, the Telegraph, then wrote an article implying that Biden was having some kind of episode that caused him to freeze. However, the WaPo notes:
The full video, when it pans, shows other people similarly standing still at the right end of the screen.
I have to wonder if the Biden-not-dancing criticism is intended to deflect the response Trump faces when he tries to dance at rallies and looks ridiculous.
If Biden were really doing as badly as Republicans would have you believe, the evidence would be everywhere; they wouldn’t have to manufacture it out of perfectly innocuous events. On the contrary, whenever Biden appears in an event too big to be controlled and packaged for the right-wing echo chamber, the Biden-is-senile narrative gets punctured and outlets like Fox News have to scramble to patch it. That’s what happened during the State of the Union, which Trump explained by saying Biden must have been “on drugs“.
Republicans are already preparing for Biden’s performance in the upcoming debate with Trump, which will undoubtedly conflict with their constructed narrative. Trump is predicting that Biden will be “on drugs” again. In an interview Thursday, Trump said he might lose the debate intentionally so that Democrats won’t take Biden off the ticket. (The idea that some behind-the-scenes cabal has the power to replace Biden is widespread on the Right. I’ve been hearing it for more than a year.)
They know Biden is sharp and will demonstrate that fact during the debate. So they’re already planting the seeds of how they’ll explain away what viewers will see with their own eyes.
Meanwhile, the evidence that something is seriously wrong with Trump really is everywhere, and doesn’t have to be manufactured. While Biden gets roasted in the media whenever he says one word when he means another, Trump frequently goes off into long what-is-he-talking-about riffs like his recent sharks-and-batteries tirade. The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols points out the obvious: If a 78-year-old relative did this at a family dinner, you’d be seriously worried about him.
Perhaps the greatest trick Donald Trump ever pulled was convincing millions of people—and the American media—to treat his lapses into fantasies and gibberish as a normal, meaningful form of oratory. … But Trump is obviously unfit—and something is profoundly wrong with a political environment in which he can now say almost anything, no matter how weird, and his comments will get a couple of days of coverage and then a shrug, as if to say: Another day, another Trump rantabout sharks.
… [M]any people in the media have fallen under the spell of the Jedi hand-waves from Trump and his people that none of this is as disturbing and weird as it sounds. The refs have been worked: A significant segment of the media—and even the Democratic Party—has bought into a Republican narrative that asking whether Trump is mentally unstable is somehow biased and elitist, the kind of thing that could only occur to Beltway mandarins who don’t understand how the candidate talks to normal people.
They walked away from that meeting, I think, a bit disheartened, a bit questioning—I don’t want to say his mental fitness—but questioning just how meandering, how, in some cases, one said to me he could not keep a thought straight. He would go in one direction and then he’d go in another direction and … there wasn’t really necessarily a through line.
Apparently the CEOs expected to see a coherent and rational behind-the-scenes Trump, one who wasn’t acting like a carnival performer to entertain his fans. But it turns out that the sharks-and-batteries Trump is the only one available.
Fake videos are OK if they’re over-the-top fake. In this hilarious one, Trump’s sharks-and-batteries riff is interspersed with reaction shots from the nurses and patients of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
and you also might be interested in …
An unsettling reminder of how easily freedom is lost: “The Apprentice” is a new movie about the relationship between a young Donald Trump and his hard-nosed lawyer Roy Cohn. The film exists, and was screened to an appreciative crowd at the Cannes festival in May.
But you can’t see it.
Distributors have bought the rights to “The Apprentice” in Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Japan and many other countries. But the filmmakers have yet to secure a deal to release it here, either in theaters or on streaming services.
Negotiations are ongoing, and domestic distribution could still come together. Yet the possibility that American audiences won’t be able to see “The Apprentice” isn’t just frustrating. It’s frightening, because it suggests that Trump and his supporters have already intimidated some media companies, which seem to be pre-emptively capitulating to him.
… The fear seems to be twofold. Few want to end up in the MAGA movement’s cross hairs the way Bud Light and Disney did. And as one distribution executive told Variety, any company that wants to be sold or to merge with or buy another company would be hesitant to touch “The Apprentice” because of the possibility that, should Trump be re-elected, his “regulators will be punitive.”
When we think about authoritarianism, we picture restrictive laws, police who throw their weight around, and prison camps. But it can be far more subtle than that, working its Leader’s will by intimidation rather than overt force. Don Corleone rarely had to make good on the implied threat in “an offer you can’t refuse”.
Friday, Vladimir Putin issued his conditions for ending the Ukraine War, which amount to Ukraine’s complete surrender: Not only must it renounce claims to its eastern provinces and Crimea, but it must permanently drop its bid to join NATO. So even after giving up territory, the remainder of Ukraine would be wide open to some future invasion.
The book is Ban This Book by Alan Gratz. And of course, it’s the oxymoronic Moms for Liberty who are behind this violation of liberty. (Can anybody come up with an example of Moms for Liberty doing something that promotes or protects liberty? I can’t.) Gratz comments:
It feels like they know exactly what they’re doing and they’re somewhat ashamed of what they’re doing and they don’t want a book on the shelves that calls them out.
Kellyanne Conway told Fox News that Trump talked to 8,000 people at a Black church in Detriot. Video makes clear it was a few hundred people, most of whom were White. The point of this kind of deception is not to attract Black voters, but to reassure White Trump supporters that he’s not racist.
The NYT’s David Leonhardt explains why both theories of Covid’s origins — natural transmission from an infected animal in the Wuhan live-animal market or a leak from Wuhan’s virus-research lab — are plausible. What he doesn’t explain (and should) is how implausible the conspiracy version of the lab-leak theory is: Covid wasn’t genetically engineered as a bio-weapon and then released for some nefarious purpose. It’s hard even to tell that story in such a way that all the major players have some clear motive to do what they’re supposed to have done.
Clark set scoring records in college, and was arguably (but not obviously) the greatest player in the history of NCAA women’s college basketball. She lifted women’s college basketball to new heights of public attention, partly due to her personal star power and exciting style of play, but also (let’s face it) because she’s White, and basketball hasn’t had a lot of White American-born heroes since Larry Bird retired.
This spring she started her professional WNBA career, and has similarly been drawing new fans to that league. So far, she’s shown some promise, but her team is terrible (that’s why they got such a high draft pick) and her quality of play does not yet live up to the level of attention she’s been getting. (She scores well, but shoots a low percentage and has a lot of turnovers, as rookies often do.) Veteran WNBA players seem to resent the spotlight on her, and so she’s getting pushed around on the court in ways that go beyond the usual rookie hazing.
Again, all of this is drawing national attention, and is fueling racial resentment among fans: To those on one extreme, she’s the White underachiever who has had stardom handed to her, and to those on the other, Black thugs are targeting her unfairly.
So now we have the Olympic team. Looking at the roster, I don’t see who should be kicked off to make room for Clark, whose WNBA performance so far doesn’t justify her inclusion. (Some sources have reported inaccurately that she’s been named as an alternate.)
In memory of those who fought here, died here, literally saved the world here, let us be worthy of their sacrifice. Let us be the generation that when history is written about our time — in 10, 20, 30, 50, 80 years from now — it will be said: When the moment came, we met the moment. We stood strong. Our alliances were made stronger. And we saved democracy in our time as well.
The bad news: It appears that the raid killed 274 Palestinians. Palestinian authorities don’t try to identify who was or wasn’t a Hamas fighter, so we don’t know how many civilians were killed. We do know that dozens of children were included in the 274 total.
But only three other hostages have been freed by military force since the start of the war. Another three were mistakenly killed by Israeli forces after they escaped on their own, and Hamas says others have been killed in Israeli airstrikes. … Over 100 hostages were released during a weeklong cease-fire last year, in exchange for Palestinians imprisoned by Israel, and reaching a similar agreement is still widely seen as the only way of getting the rest of the hostages back.
President Biden has put forward a peace plan that pairs a full hostage release with a complete ceasefire. But Prime Minister Netanyahu stands by his condition that Hamas be “completely defeated” before hostilities can end. Gantz’ protest is related to the idea that no one can define what “completely defeated” means, so Netanyahu’s plan seems to be to continue fighting indefinitely.
and more reaction to Trump’s felony conviction
Rick Perlstein hangs around in far-right social-media communities — and he claims that’s not why he’s depressed — reporting on “The Republican Id“. His article got me thinking about the weird dichotomy we’re seeing.
On the one hand, Trump (along with virtually all elected Republicans) are pouring out violence-promoting rhetoric. They’re not exactly saying “Go out and kill liberals”, but they’re definitely hinting in that direction. Trump predicts that seeing him sentenced to jail “would be tough for the public to take. You know, at a certain point, there’s a breaking point.”
What are MAGA folks supposed to do when they “break”? He doesn’t say.
After The New York Times published a story that said Trump was unhappy with the meager crowd he saw when he arrived at the courthouse for opening statements on Monday, Trump posted on social media on Tuesday to deny the story, denigrate a Times reporter and make this claim: “Thousands of people were turned away from the Courthouse in Lower Manhattan by steel stanchions and police, literally blocks from the tiny side door from where I enter and leave. It is an armed camp to keep people away.”
Trump also wrote on social media on Monday that “Lower Manhattan surrounding the Courthouse, where I am heading now, is completely CLOSED DOWN.” And he told reporters inside the courthouse on Tuesday: “For blocks you can’t get near this courthouse.”
He succeeded in inciting a riot once: on January 6. Other than that day, and in spite of all the violent rhetoric on social media and all the death threats against anyone who speaks out against him, his supporters seem to have little appetite for mass action on his behalf.
and the border
President Biden announced a new border policy this week. It’s complicated, but the basic idea is to stop letting people apply for asylum when the number of daily border crossings gets too high. Vox elaborates.
The underlying problem at the border can’t be solved without congressional action, which Trump and his allies have blocked: The US is obligated by law and treaty to give asylum to refugees who meet certain standards of persecution, but the system that processes asylum claims was not designed to handle the current quantity and is hopelessly jammed. People wait years for a hearing, and what should we do with them in the meantime? As the new executive order puts it:
For the vast majority of people in immigration proceedings, the current laws make it impossible to quickly grant protection to those who require it and to quickly remove those who do not establish a legal basis to remain in the United States. This reality is compounded by the fact that the Congress has chronically underfunded our border security and immigration system and has failed to provide the resources or reforms it needs to be able to deliver timely consequences to most individuals who cross unlawfully and cannot establish a legal basis to remain in the United States.
Executive orders can’t create new courts, hire new judges, or ameliorate the conditions that cause people to leave their home countries. They can only change how the backlog is handled. And even then, the Supreme Court may decide that Biden has exceeded his authority. (In recent years, the Court has interpreted Biden’s authority far less generously than it did Trump’s.)
and the Supreme Court
Still no word on the immunity case that the Court is using to delay Trump’s D.C. trial until after the election. The court’s term is expected to end later this month.
Meanwhile, there were two new reasons to doubt the conservative majority’s honesty and impartiality: First, the neighbor at the heart of Justice Alito’s flag controversy has disputed his story, and seems to have a police report to back up her version of the timeline. Watch her CNN interview. (Almost as disturbing as the Alito lie is the neighbor’s account of how the Alito’s tried to intimidate her.)
And second, Fix the Court has published a tally of all the gifts accepted by the justices who served during the last 20 years. The $4.7 million total is stunning in itself, but the jaw-dropping fact is that more than $4 million went to Clarence Thomas, nearly matching his already-generous salary. Fix the Court says the total is “probably an undercount”.
Because it has fallen so close to the trial that found Trump guilty of multiple felonies, the Hunter Biden trial is providing a grand opportunity for projection. Here, Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro discusses the “mob mentality” of the Biden family and their attempt to intimidate jurors. (To see how a family with a real mob-mentality operates, look at Pro Publica’s recent report: “Nine witnesses in the criminal cases against former President Donald Trump have received significant financial benefits, including large raises from his campaign, severance packages, new jobs, and a grant of shares and cash from Trump’s media company.” Take care of the Boss, and the Boss will take care of you.)
How are the Bidens carrying out this “intimidation”? First Lady Jill Biden, who has been Hunter’s step-mother since he was seven years old, has been showing up at his trial! Her presence, Pirro claims, tells jurors that “We know who you are. We’re in the courtroom and we’re watching you.” (Very scary lady, that Jill Biden.)
And then there’s Joe, who spent the entire previous weekend with his son! Another Fox host quotes a New York Post writer suggesting this is a “cynical power play” aimed at sending a “Mafia-like” message to potential jurors: “Screw with my son and you screw with me.”
Consider the parallels and contrasts with the Trump trial: Nobody from Trump’s family supported him in court until the media started to notice, and neither Melania nor Ivanka ever made an appearance. (“His family is nowhere to be seen. His wife, at least presently, is not to be seen at his side; his children have vanished; his loved ones have melted away.”) You know who did show up? Power players: the Speaker of the House, numerous senators and congressmen. (Matt Gaetz ominously tweeted that he was “standing back and standing by, Mr. President”. Standing by to do what to who?)
Can you picture Hakeem Jeffries or Chuck Schumer going to Delaware to attend Hunter’s trial? What would they do there? Is AOC standing back and standing by?
Trump jurors can only hope they stay anonymous, because Trump’s supporters post threats against them (and the judge and his daughter) daily. But if you’re a Biden supporter, you probably can’t name the judge in Hunter’s trial, or any of the judge’s family members. I know I can’t. I have no interest in finding out who Hunter’s jurors are, and I don’t know anybody who does. Those people are all safe from us, no matter how the trial comes out.
But yes, Fox News, tell me more about the Biden family’s “mob-like” approach to Hunter’s trial.
The Bidens have gone to great lengths to communicate to Hunter that no matter what mistakes he has made in life, he is still their son and they love him. How sinister of them! How unlike the Trump family.
Meanwhile, the House committee that failed to find any evidence linking Joe Biden to whatever sketchy business deals brother James and son Hunter might have had going has taken its next step: The committee refers James and Hunter to the DoJ, claiming that they lied to the committee about Joe not having anything to do with their business deals.
See the logic? The complete lack of evidence is the clearest sign that the conspiracy is working.
and you also might be interested in …
Three Trump allies have been charged with forgery for their role in the Wisconsin fake elector plot.
Steve Bannon is finally going to jail. He will start a four-month sentence for contempt of Congress on July 1. During that time he will probably go to trial for his role in conning contributors to his We Build the Wall fund.
Trump has pardoned Bannon for his role in stealing from Trump supporters, but New York state has decided to pursue charges. His accomplices are already in jail.
In a strong hint that the Sandy Hook parents he slandered may finally see some money, Alex Jones has changed his bankruptcy filing. Originally he filed for a Chapter 11 reorganization, but he has changed that to a Chapter 7 liquidation.
Just before the guilty verdict in Trump’s Manhattan trial was announced, Maryland Republican senate candidate Larry Hogan made a statement that would be uncontroversial in any other era of American life. He asked people to “respect the verdict and the legal process”.
That pro-civic stance has just about gotten him run out of the Republican Party, which appears to be ready to sacrifice the Maryland senate seat in order to enforce MAGA discipline.
I left because I couldn’t tell the lie. The 2020 election wasn’t stolen. The Jan. 6 defendants aren’t political prisoners…There’s a lot of life out there besides arguing about nothing and telling lies. I made a choice to go enjoy what I’ve got left.
A book you might want to read: They Came for the Schools by Mike Hixenbaugh. It’s the story of how the model suburb of Southlake, Texas began to recognize it had a racism problem and tried to deal with it, until a backlash led to a right-wing takeover of the school board.
You may have seen news stories about Southlake in the last few years. It was the testing ground for the conservative campaign against “critical race theory” and for the idea that teachers and librarians were trying to “groom” children to become gay or trans. I had been loosely following that story, but seeing everything laid out in one narrative is pretty amazing.
The big thing I glean from this story is that the conservative cultural project doesn’t work without lying. Parents need to be convinced that schools are teaching things nobody is actually teaching, and they need to believe that members of their community not just wrongheaded, but are engaged in unimaginable evil.
Justin Rosario tells the story of his wife’s two miscarriages in 2006. Her situation (both times) was very similar to that of women in red states who very nearly bleed to death, and sometimes suffer permanent consequences, because of abortion bans. But Justin’s wife got the medical care she needed and survived to have two children. (If you have the time, read the comments on this post. Many are by women telling their own miscarriage stories.)
Recently, friends told me a similar story about a miscarriage suffered by their daughter, a girl I watched grow up. Similarly, she was in a blue state and is fine now, probably planning her next attempt at motherhood. But what, they wondered, might have happened to her Texas or Missouri?
Rosario:
What if the next time, [my wife’s] miscarriage had stalled and become septic like [a woman in Texas]’s? Numerous women have had this happen to them throughout Republican-controlled states already. They’ve lost the ability to have children. Some of them have possibly died.
If you’re wondering why these stories have not been massive front-page headlines for weeks on end, you should know the answer by now. Doing so would require discussing why these women are suffering and dying and that would require pointing the finger, unerringly, at Republicans.
But we don’t do that in America’s press. We will run hundreds of above-the-fold articles about a “crisis” at the border to terrorize racist white people but talk about how Republicans are literally maiming and killing women? No, thank you. That would be biased.
This strikes me as a revealing clip from Fox News: Interviewers ask Trump a question submitted by a viewer: “What’s your relationship with God like and how do you pray?” He never answers. Instead he talks about how well he does with Evangelical voters and how many people are praying for him. Eventually he goes off on a tangent about how people who don’t believe in God have no reason to be good.
I can’t decide: Is he dodging? Or does the question make no sense to him because he has no inner life to report on?
The Weekly Sift 