Open Mic for the week of 7/8/2024
On this day in 1947, A local newspaper reported that a “flying saucer” had been recovered near Roswell, New Mexico.
There’s a phenomenon where someone writes an essay about this or that but someone else wants to discuss something that has not yet made it to the front page.
This is unfair to everybody involved. It’s unfair to the guy who wrote the original essay because, presumably, he wants to talk about his original essay. It’s unfair to the guy who wants to talk about his link because it looks like he’s trying to change the subject. It’s unfair to the people who go to the comments to read up on the thoughts of the commentariat for the original essay and now we’re talking about some other guy’s links.
So!
The intention is to have a new one of these every week. If you want to talk about a link, post it here! Or, heck, use it as an open thread.
And, if it rolls off, we’ll make a new one. With a preamble just like this one.
MattY has an essay explaining how he got Biden’s age thing wrong.
He uses the analogy of a duckrabbit and how he was someone who saw the rabbit, clear as day, and thought that the duck people were being partisan, or exaggerating, or lying, or, you know, just *PRETENDING* to see the duck.
Well, the debate showed him the duck.
He spends some time discussing how seeing the rabbit is self-reinforcing and the duck people just sound paranoid.
And now that he sees the duck, he’s irritated. For a host of reasons.
Here’s the part that might address a common counter-argument to his newfound ability to see the duck:
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I’m bristling at the analogy. The duckrabbit is an optical illusion. It’s a drawing that the brain interprets. It’s not a duck or a rabbit. Joe Biden is a public figure who has been in cognitive decline for years. Commentators who haven’t been writing about it were either deceived, self-deceived, or lying.Report
You’ll probably prefer Eigen’s essay then:
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I didn’t find either of these pieces quite satisfying in terms of explanatory power. If the mainstream press was in fact hiding things it knew, then shame on them for failing to do their jobs. However the Eigen essay doesn’t really make that case, and he cites a bunch of mainstream sources showing that some level of concern has been aired about Biden’s age from the beginning. On the other side of it, the right wing press’ credibility problems are well earned. Everyone can and I would think does fairly assume that they are running interference for a candidate that is also in a clear and obvious decline due to age (albeit maybe not as apparent as Biden’s looked on the debate stage). They’re being given an even bigger break on that because the mainstream press has stupidly gone in on ‘not normalizing Trump’ and the result is that air time isn’t given to him just looking like a senile old fool, notwithstanding the fact that there are plenty of recordings of just that.
What IMO really happened here is all about the setting of the bar. Team Biden clearly had set the bar low, and has been setting the bar low for these kinds of performances from before he was even elected. Up until the debate he had been able to clear them. That isn’t the same as turning in a good showing, but under promising and over delivering has been enough when the opponent was Trump. The debate was the first time even that low bar was not cleared.Report
If the mainstream press was in fact hiding things it knew, then shame on them for failing to do their jobs.
POSIWID.
I submit: They were doing what they thought was their job.Report
I think that the POSIWID analysis tends to fail to account for mundane stuff like laziness and stupidity. And as the Eigen piece itself shows, it isn’t like there was no reporting in the MSM on this issue.Report
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” –Richard P. Feynman
My irritated attitude is that there’s no accountability for screwing up.
You know the old IBM saying: “A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.”
We fixed that by making sure that nobody can ever be held accountable.
Including journalismists who get stuff catastrophically wrong.Report
What do you think accountability looks like for those journalists? And who gives it to them?Report
“You screwed up. You’re fired!”
Something like that.
Who gives it to them? “Eh, we’re still moving product, you’re still getting hits. You’re good.”
Followed by “Unforeseen Circumstances” and then we can talk about layoffs and talk about how unfair this is.Report
Yea, I’m trying to figure out what covering this correctly looks like. At minimum I would think there is a lot more video and letting the video speak for itself (applied to both candidates, you can find videos of Trump looking old and lost too, but mostly from sources with their own credibility issues).
To me the small-l liberal media has basically f*cked itself by muddying up a feedback loop. This all looks a lot different if the pressure we are seeing on Biden over the last 2 weeks manifested even as recently as last fall.Report
“I didn’t find either of these pieces quite satisfying in terms of explanatory power.”
I think that what happened was that people figured that since it was Those Lying Liars Who Lie saying Biden was old and feeble, then obviously that must have been untrue, and the debate happened and they saw that it was actually true, and now they’re trying to find a way to blame Those Lying Liars Who Lie instead of admitting that they’d substituted teamplay for thinking.Report
How many 80 year olds do you know or are related to? What’s your daily or weekly experience of them?Report
“Do parents count?”
“Oh, so you’re basing your entire world view on an N of 1 or 2?”Report
sure parents count. Aunts and uncles too. Family friends.
My point is if you have regular contact and interaction with such persons, you are well equipped to judge the President’s mental fitness. If all you have are self serving pundits and media types whose paycheck depends on clicks, you don’t.Report
Well, without getting too much into family drama, at 80ish, you slow down a lot. It’s easy to look at the 80 year old person you’ve known your whole live and still see the 60 year old and the 50 year old and a little bit of the 40 year old and the 30-something of your youth.
To the point where it can be jarring to have someone who hasn’t known them for decades declare them to be “old”.
Did you see John Stewart’s take on the debate (the event where the kid yelled “HE’S NAKED!”)?
There it is.
You don’t have to agree with the kid.
But, if you watch the vid (which aired immediately after the debate), you might be able to wrap your head around why someone else might think that the kid accurately assessed the situation.
It might add context to what Yggy and Eigen said above.Report
“My point is if you have regular contact and interaction with such persons, you are well equipped to judge the President’s mental fitness.”
I don’t agree with this idea. My exposure to seniors has taught me that a person can have fine days and bad minutes, or be far worse off than that. We can’t afford to have a president who’s in decline though. Someone, maybe you, mentioned McConnell recently, and a lot of people have called for him to step down – he certainly isn’t running for reelection, at least. But a senator doesn’t have to be “on” continuously. We can have even a high-ranking senator who has lapses. We shouldn’t ever have a president in that state.Report
Everyone curates his own information feed, by the weights he puts on each potential news source. Your information feed has just been proven faulty. Are you going to reappraise your current sources and add new ones?Report
That’s a fair question. My information feed has for years included people like Andrew Sullivan and Nate Silver who have been sounding the alarm about Biden’s age for quite some time. It’s also not like the MSM hasn’t dutifully reported on this to some degree. Eigen talks about it in the piece Jaybird cited and there was a Silver post that got into it as well:
https://www.natesilver.net/p/blaming-the-media-is-what-got-democrats
As someone who was an early proponent of the theory that Biden’s age was in fact a huge liability for him, I have complicated feelings about how the media has covered the story both before and after the debate. On the one hand, the coverage before was clearly inadequate — and it centered too much on the electoral implications and not the even more fundamental question of Biden’s fitness for office. On the other hand, the coverage wasn’t zero by any means: the Wall Street Journal, in particular, had taken the issue seriously, and Biden’s age and mental acuity was the subject of several weeks of sustained coverage following Special Counsel Robert K. Hur’s finding in February that Biden was a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” who had “diminished faculties in advancing age.”
For me personally, my expectation prior to the debate was that it would be along the lines of SOTU. Not great in a vacuum or by any objective measure but probably good enough if your opponent is a 78 year old scatter brained rambler that transparently makes things up as he speaks and who tried to illegitimately hang onto power after losing an election. Biden as we now know fell well short of that in his performance, and I will take the failure to emphasize this the way it should have been as another data point when I read MSM coverage.
That said I like to think I’m not overly credulous. I already assume any topic reported on by the MSM that by virtue of chaos theory has something to do with race or sex and sexuality is at best highly misleading and probably outright agitprop. But by virtue of not being overly credulous, I’m also not going to suddenly start granting any credibility to a bunch of MAGA friendly news that was constantly trafficking stories and videos about Biden’s decline but which would never think to shine that sort of light on their own candidate.Report
Maybe the lesson is to not trust the good things a side says about itself, but listen to the bad things a side says about its opponents?Report
Assuming the goal is to get closer to the actual truth, you have to be like a juror and understand that both sides are giving you a mixture of good and bad information based on their motives, and you have to weigh the info and claims against each other. Part of that is making sure you’re hearing the testimony of both sides in the first place, instead of filtering down to just one and guessing where they might be off.Report
I think if one is going to dismiss a criticism it needs to be done on the merits, not merely the basis of the person making the claim. Ruy Texiera has written about Democrats and D sympathetic media falling into what he calls the ‘Fox News fallacy.’ I think it explains at least some of what happened here.Report
I’ve been hearing terms like “blue MAGA” lately.Report
Heh, I already get called way worse things than that by people I generally vote and agree with on most major policy issues.Report
There are a few people here I might put in Blue MAGA territory, but you’re definitely not one of them. It’s the ones who are sticking with “one bad debate!!” “He had a cold!!!” etc who qualify.Report
“Biden’s done a great job and he’s the only one who’s defeated Trump – why would we walk away from him now? You don’t bench your star quarterback at halftime just because he broke both his legs!”Report
It’s the best essay I’ve read so far from someone who was for sticking with Biden up until the debate — it’s a true mea culpa. The purpose of the analogy isn’t to excuse his mistake, it’s to help explain how the debate performance changed everything, including the interpretation of many events that came before it.
Though the problem with that particular optical illusion is that it’s very easy to make yourself see one or the other — a better analogy would’ve been one where it takes you a long time to see something but then once you see it, you can never go back. Like the third image in this post: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/09/12/its-bayes-all-the-way-up/Report
So what we should be talking about, what all Americans should be talking about, is Project 2025 and the plan to roll back the 20th century and turn America into a Christian Nationalist state.
The centerpiece is to eliminate the Progressive Era separation of power between the executive and civil service, making all government agencies arms of the political party;
Enforcing a Christian Nationalist vision of personal and family life where gay and trans people are not allowed to exist;
Stripping the legal system of independence and making law enforcement an arm of the party.
You can read it for yourself here:
https://www.project2025.org/Report
Man, I went to this page and it’s nothing but PDFs!
Could you please summarize these PDFs for me, so I won’t have to read anything?Report
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025#:~:text=Project%202025%20seeks%20to%20place,Trade%20Commission%2C%20and%20other%20agencies.Report
Man, don’t visit the talk page on *THAT* Wikipedia entry!Report
Well there’s your summary. Do you like what they are proposing? Do you see it as advancing your personal interests? Harming you? Helping or harming people and communities you care about?
I mean I don’t see your favorite smokable getting legalized under this scenario.Report
It ain’t getting legalized under this one either, though.
As for what they are proposing… It seems like the descriptions of the contents of the PDFs are in dispute according to the Talk page.
I can’t wait to see what the page looks like when it settles down.Report
You asked for a summary.
You were given a summary.
You seem to care more about how and how much people are arguing about the summary then the actual content.
Noted.Report
Thank you for the summary!
Is it your position that I should take the summary at face value?
Fair enough. I’ll keep that in mind for the next time that you ask for a source.Report
The Talk page has little to do with the veracity of the summary. Kind of like this page has little to do with the veracity of the stories posted to it.
It’s my position that you will get a lot farther discussing the substance of the policy proposals on the table then discussing what other people are saying about them.Report
So you’re saying that summaries aren’t as good as original documents?
Fair enough. I guess I’ll read the PDFs.
Lemme know if you have any questions about the PDFs. I’ll try to answer them for you.Report
nice try at deflecting. I’m saying the summary is good and useful and can lead to fruitful policy discussions. the Talk page, however, has no bearing on that, nor does it influence the veracity of the summary. the Talk page is just white noise.Report
So you’re saying that you can use summaries instead of the original documents but criticisms of the summaries are not useful?
That’s a silly position and I wouldn’t want to defend it.Report
https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FOREWORD.pdfReport
Fantastic. Campaigns should be run on issues, and if I were asked for four bullet points for the GOP, they wouldn’t be much different than those.
I don’t think that liberals understand the purpose of Project 2025 though. It’s always been about protecting Trump’s policies from Trump’s lousy personnel decisions. They want him to have a list of people who will actually do what he wants, rather than leave him or his people the freedom to act on impulses and grudges. Trump had very few judicial appointments that conservatives would complain about, and that’s because he had a list and promised to follow it. They want to use the same approach for the executive appointments.Report
um no. They want to reach down to my level of the federal apparatus, and make us loyalists. Not the same thing. Not by a long shot.Report
They appear to have studied the Soviets for the idea of having all organs of the state embedded with a political minder who is under the direct control of the party.Report
Thought Crime will become a thing . . .
Which darkly amuses me because the size of the bureaucratic state won’t be able to shrink since the minders will need minders. Never mind the fact that supposedly freedom and liberty loving people want to directly restrict freedoms . . .Report
They want to reach down to my level of the federal apparatus, and make us loyalists.
Depending on how “Dismantle the administrative state…” is interpreted, they may want to just get rid of you altogether.
It’s difficult to get them to explain “dismantle” coherently. Do you want to keep the National Weather Service? Okay, does NOAA get to keep operating the satellites? How about the super-computer resources and global weather models? And so on, and so forth.
Recall Rick Perry’s surprise when, after he was appointed Secretary of Energy, he discovered that DOE is the civilian agency that designs, builds, and maintains the nuclear warheads.Report
Schedule F reached to the GS14 cadre …. The discussion of NOAA in the Commerce Department section describes us operating satellites but no longer forecasting the weather; no longer making fisheries management decisions in federal waters, and loosing our research functions cause that’s all about climate change apparently. They also want to send our ships and planes to GSA . . . and they make no mention of our officer Corps – who would probably be reassigned to Coast Guard. So not quite getting rid of us, but certainly dismantling the apparatus as far as they think they can.
At least with Project 2025 I finally have a concrete answer to my oft asked question of what exactly would you cut.Report
What is revealing in the document is how it touches every single American in the most intimate of ways.
It states that the government should “maintain a biblically based, social-science-reinforced definition of marriage and family.”
Literally every federal agency is to be turned to this mission, to enforce Christian Nationalism in everything from Census data, to the military, to the judiciary.
People who conform to the Christian Nationalist form of family and childrearing are allowed to live normally, while those ho don’t are forcibly excluded or punished.
Abortion is to be banned, same sex marriage abolished and any mention of queer life is swept under the definition of “pornography” which is also banned.Report
When the Right talks about “returning self-governance to the American people”, I have no idea what they mean. The people elect Congress and state legislatures. Congress people and state legislators write laws that concern various matters important to the body politic. These laws are carried out by a civil service. How is this not self-governance?Report
When it means Democrats get elected and can put their egalitarian, equitable policies into practice.Report
The linked document has a 1-2 page explanation of each of the four points.Report
Its not “self governance” when this is your view of the civil service:
Report
Watch out! PDF’s are scary!Report
NO! They take forever to download and lock up your browser!
Kids these days.Report
At some point, I’m going to have to report myself for harassing you.Report
if your browser is locking from these PDF’s you need an update.Report
Yeah, I read the Dept. of Interior brief (figured I’d start with something only Michael Cain would care about)… much of the section was advocating for keeping the Dept of Interior HQ out west (which Trump did, I guess?) and not pull it back to DC (which Biden is doing, I guess?).
Admittedly there were also a lot of bullets saying things like extend or reinstate “SO 3351: Strengthening the Department of the Interior’s Energy Portfolio” and “Clarify the Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act94 to ensure consistent application with other federal infrastructure loan programs under the Federal Credit Reform Act. This should be done to foster opportunities for locally led investment in water infrastructure.”
I’m sure there are things that I’d agree were good ideas and things I’d say were horrible ideas, but there weren’t any things that I’d say were obviously fascist. If anything they were very Heritage-ish … which means I’d probably be against much of it; but I haven’t seen an actual quote (yet) of the real thing that the other team should appropriately campaign against.
I’ve seen some things that I *think* Team Blue *could* campaign against that I’d support (i.e. I’d agree w/Heritage) but which would be more popular with the general public than my position. Quite possibly (probably) there’s a humdinger in one of those position papers, but give me the quote and the link… not a link to Amanda Marcotte saying things about things.
Based on current events, I’m guessing that Trump distancing is around Mifepristone/Day After pills — which you can read about in the Health and Human Services section.Report
I read the part about reforming the Intelligence Community and it talks about stuff like “Security Clearance Reform” and there was a section devoted to making sure that the intelligence agencies can’t be abused for partisan reasons which is obviously intended to harm Democrats.Report
Did you read the last paragraph on page 204?Report
Workplace competence? We should list out the demographics that that will end up discriminating against.Report
They already did it for you!
Anyone whose personal opinions about culture deviate from Christian Nationalism are no longer protected, but punished.Report
What page is that on?Report
Starting on page 450.Report
In the part about the Department of Health and Human Services?Report
Yes.Report
I’m not seeing it.Report
Did you read the part in “Affirming the Separation of Powers,” (p 559) where it contends that the executive branch — that is, the president and his team at the Justice Department — is just as empowered as any other branch of government to “assess constitutionality”?
The President is also empowered to overrule Congress and the courts whenever it conflicts with his wishes.Report
They’re interpreting that the three branches are all able to assess constitutionality?
I kinda preferred it when the executive branch just didn’t care whether something was constitutional or not and just *DID* it.Report
um no – they want the Executive Branch to be the sole interpreter when it’s convenient. They don’t want the judiciary to do anything but rubber stamp those decisions.Report
That’s not what the paragraph says. The paragraph says:
You should read the original documents instead of relying on less trustworthy summaries written by partisans.Report
The part you quoted directly contradicts the actual Constitution.
This is another Soviet perverse definition where words are used opposite of their meaning.
When combined with their Unitary Executive theory, this passage in effect states the President has the power to overrule the other two branches of government.Report
What does it say in the constitution about assessment of constitutionality?Report
That the Judiciary is tasked with determining the constitutionality of the legislation and actions of the other two branches.Report
What part is that in? I’d like to read it for myself. Article III, I’m guessing?
I’m not seeing how it’s directly contradicted by what I quoted.Report
Well since Article 3 says that the power of the judiciary – that is the power to interpret laws and Constitutionality – lies only with the Supreme Court and any inferior courts Congress creates. Your quote makes it clear that the Project 2025 writers believe that the President ahs equal power to do so. If that were the case, we wouldn’t need SCOTUS, would we?Report
The quotation was “directly contradicts the actual Constitution”.
I’m not seeing the direct contradiction.
Arguing that the Legislative and the Executive cannot assess Constitutionality seems silly.
Now the position of Judicial Supremacy when it comes to the assessment of Constitutionality is one that has a long tradition… but Judicial Supremacy is only important when there’s a dispute.
Not when either of the other two co-equal branches makes its own assessment at all.Report
The Constitution famously doesn’t assign the power to interpret Constitutionality. I’m not implying anything by saying that.Report
“[T]hey want the Executive Branch to be the sole interpreter when it’s convenient. They don’t want the judiciary to do anything but rubber stamp those decisions.”
oh wait so now you support the Chevron decision?Report
This most recent one? No. And this isn’t that.
But you go ahead an pat yourself on the back for attempting to troll me.Report
I’ll read it now…
That section is explicit that it would challenge ‘Humphrey’s Executor’ so that it might have more direct control of the federal bureaucracy. I’ll confess to not having an opinion on Humphrey’s Executor… and I’ll admit to always favoring reining in the Imperial Presidency… and I’ll further cop to wanting the Legislative Branch to actually legislate and defend *it’s* prerogatives too. So I’d see SCOTUS siding w/Congress (as it already has under Roberts in 2020) that this would be a Shared Power (a’la the recent immunity case).
The Presidency has been expanding its reach since, well, ever. You’re perfectly welcome to campaign on upholding the principle of Humphrey’s Executor — I’d even give you a ‘bully bully’ from the sidelines; but this isn’t an ‘existential threat’… it strikes me as a very Heritage-esq Imperial Presidency policy preference; Sadly the Imperial Presidency is bi-partisan.
And, since, none of us know what this ruling was about… here’s wikipedia:
Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, 295 U.S. 602 (1935), was a Supreme Court of the United States case decided regarding whether the United States President has the power to remove executive officials of a quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial administrative body for reasons other than what is allowed by Congress. The Court held that the President did not have this power. However, Humphrey’s has been distinguished by Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. In Seila, Chief Justice John Roberts described Humphrey’s as holding that Congress may occasionally create independent agencies with removal only for cause if such agencies share the characteristics of the FTC in 1935.Report
People seem to be getting better at this but I think we still run into the Paul Ryan video problem of people not wanting to believe that there is a group of Americans who believe these extreme things. A lot of people still go into deep denial even as the Heritage Foundation publishes and gloats about their plans and says there will be no violence as long as we don’t resist. This is naturally very scary too many people, so they go into “it can’t happen here” mode.Report
So Trump’s :peace plan” for Ukraine is to basically given Putin what he’s already conquered.
Tell me again why Putin deserves a d@mn thing:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/08/europe/ukraine-russian-strike-childrens-hospital-intl/index.htmlReport
Are you surprised, I’m not? Meanwhile, many members of the Further Left will be elated because they love Russia and hate Ukraine for some weird reasons.Report
I’m not surprised that Russia would hit a children’s hospital and call it a military target. That’s what you do when you want to erase your enemy.Report
I haven’t seen the plan, and I wouldn’t assume what the negotiations would be like based on a campaign position. I give the Biden administration credit for standing by Ukraine. But this really seems like a case where we missed the right time to make a deal. It fits the narrative of an administration in paralysis.Report
There is no deal to make. Putin has been clear for a decade (since he invaded Donbas) that he intend to recreate the Russian Empire – which means Ukraine once again ceases to be an independent country. He will not cede land captured, and he will not stop at any newly redrawn borders. and as long as he continues to bomb clearly civilian targets there is no need to offer him anything beyond unconditional surrender.Report
and even of that weren’t true, what is Valdimir Putin’s word worth? Russian recognised Ukraine’s sovereignty back in ’92, what value is there in them doing it again?Report
The Further Left has basically decided to place Jews in general and Israeli Jews in particular in the enemy camp. We had a prominent doctor at UCSF openly state that Zionists, read Jewish, presence, in medicine harms people of color. There was a massive protest by Pro-Palestinian activists outside a synagogue in Los Angeles because they thought the synagogue was having a real estate auction for land in Gaza. Links were provided last week.
Meanwhile, this Saturday I encountered this dismal little book:
https://www.amazon.com/Towers-Ivory-Steel-Universities-Palestinian/dp/1804291749
The basic thesis is that Israeli universities, which have Arab Israeli students, professors, and administrators, are tools of oppression. It is increasingly clear that the only type of justice many people are going to recognize is the complete destruction of Israel the dismantling of everything the Jews built as illegitimate settler-colonialism. They will never ever stop.
I’m feeling glum. The Jewish people are under siege from a Further Right that never liked us and a Further Left that has no use for us and also never really liked us. There is a feeling of political homelessness.Report
One of the very Soviet-style mannerisms of Project 2025 is how it redefines words to mean their opposite.
For example, it demands that “The next conservative Administration must ensure that the DOJ zealously guards the constitutional rights of all Americans.”
Wow, that sounds great!
Oh, then it goes on to tell us what those “rights” are by saying that private businesses should have the “right” to discriminate against queer people.
Do queer people have the “right” to participate openly as full equals? Ha ha, of course not because it violates the prime directive to “maintain a biblically based, social-science-reinforced definition of marriage and family.”
In their America, you have only the right to live as they tell you to.Report
Let us remember that students of Liberty University have the most strict student code in the United States. On the other blog somebody posted a link about how liberty really means something like liberty to be blessed rather than what most humans see as freedom.Report
Another Soviet-ism:
They complain bitterly about the administrative state to the point of wanting to gut the EPA of its power to enforce pollution regulations, but use the administrative state to dictate to people who they are allowed to marry, what kinds of sex are permissible. and categorize homosexuality itself as a form of pornography.Report
It is the liberty to follow “God’s will”Report
At this point Biden has basically told everyone he is staying in the race and they can try at a convention to take the nomination away from him. Reader, anyone who tries is almost certain to fail. The race is Biden v. Trump. This is it.
I mentioned before that Biden had a rally in Wisconsin on Friday and spoke at several events in Pennsylvania on Sunday. The events in Philadelphia were at a lot of African-American churches. The Times and other media sources, in their frenzy, are at least also reporting that Biden does have strong bases of support among the Democratic base and the delegates to the convention who were selected to nominate him.
What seems to be happening is that the media especially the Times went on a “but her emails” esque frenzy with a meth binge thrown in and failed. The media and pundit and big donor class or white dudes who comment on political blogs wants Biden to step down but the base has decided that it is largely pro-Biden.
The media has taken its shot, it missed. Biden is apparently still raking it in with smaller donors.Report
And there’s this:
“OGC [Office of General Counsel] should hire significantly more Schedule C/political appointees who in turn supervise career staff and manage their output. DHS’s mission is politically charged, and the legal function cannot be allowed to thwart the Administration’s agenda by providing stilted or erroneous legal positions and decision-making.” (P. 162)
What this means is that instead of giving the President unbiased honest assessment of the legality of his actions, the General Counsel’s mandate is to find a way to provide a legal pretext for the President’s action.
It is consistent with the theme that the President is King, and his agenda cannot be thwarted, even by law.Report
Personally, I like the idea that it’s bad to provide stilted or erroneous legal positions.Report
“Stilted or erroneous” = “Politically Incorrect”.Report
Its simpler then that. They don’t want legal opinions – or judicial findings – that bind them in any way.Report
Stilted, sad to say, is par for the course whatever agenda the political appointees may have.Report
I’d argue its what you get when you let government lawyers write things. Despite the statutes requiring plain language . . . .Report
As a government lawyer myself, I constantly struggle with trying to get clear, punchy language past supervisors who want it stilted.Report
Remember the big media freak out, from checks notes, this weekend, that Biden might have Parkinson’s because a Parkinson’s expert visited the White House? Guess what? It turns out that the expert was advising the White House on a Parkinson’s policy rather than examining Biden personally.
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/image.pngReport
You lack the proper conspiratorial mindset. Of course the Biden crime family is falsifying visitor records…Report
The White House has confirmed that the Parkinson’s expert has given Biden neurological exams. That’s not his only reason to be there, but he wasn’t there merely to advise on policy.
WARNING!!! PDF!!!
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Letter7.8.24.pdfReport
Also, the big freak out that Biden might have Parkinson’s wasn’t because of the Parkinson’s expert, it was because he displayed several of the most common symptoms of Parkinson’s, while the White House was denying that Biden saw a doctor after the debate (he later said he did), and the White House had been promoting a narrative that Biden’s previous displays were “cheapfakes”, *and* the Parkinson’s expert.Report
Vox has not gotten the memo.
Maybe they got a different memo.Report
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/07/09/save-act-republican-voting-immigration/Report
Nate Silver has an essay where he talks about how he sees the lay of the land:
(1) Biden’s situation is probably already beyond repair.
(2) Biden is almost certain to have other “senior movements”, which could come past the point of no return.
(3) Democrats haven’t gone all that far up the escalatory ladder.
(4) Democrats do have some nuclear options.
(5) Running for another term is probably not in Biden’s best interest.
(6) Kamala Harris is probably a mutually agreeable option.
You’re not going to believe #7!
Anyway, he strikes me as honestly relating what he sees before him.
Sam Wang has a substack, but he hasn’t updated it since March.Report
There is a lot of noise around this but there are two truths as the land lays right now:
1) Biden isn’t stepping aside short of – in his very own words – and Act of God
2) if he doesn’t step aside, the only realistic mechanism to remove him is at the convention
That’s it, until number 1) changes you either do 2) or shut up about it, which no one will because we live in the time we do.Report
There’s no cost to Biden in insisting he won’t step back, whether he does or not. However, the second he indicates uncertainty, he can’t take it back. So while I’m sure he wants to keep going, his saying that he’s not stepping aside doesn’t mean anything.Report
“I sent a boat, I sent a helicopter…”Report
Re #2… I’m waiting to see a proposal that doesn’t violate the party’s rules and can block a candidate who shows up with a huge super-majority of bound delegates from winning on the first ballot. A number of Republican AG’s have indicated they are prepared to go to court if the party attempts to block bound delegates from their state from voting for the primary winner, at least for the first or first few rounds. Also complicated by the fact that we are six weeks from the opening of the convention — five weeks from the voting if they do the conference call thing — and none of the leading “candidates” other than Harris have filed the FEC paperwork.
The Democratic National Party has spent decades jiggering their rules so that #2 can’t happen unless the candidate withdraws.Report
If I have this correct,
IX.F.3.(d):
All delegates to the National Convention pledged to a presidential candidate shall in all good conscience reflect the sentiments of those who elected them.
IX.G:
In the event of death, resignation or disability of a nominee of the Party for President or Vice President after the adjournment of the National Convention, the National Chairperson of the Democratic National Committee shall confer with the Democratic
leadership of the United States Congress and the Democratic Governors Association and shall report to the Democratic National Committee, which is authorized to fill the
vacancy or vacancies.
It’s not much to work with, but it’s something.
https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/2024-Call-for-Convention.pdfReport
If Biden is not fit to be on the ballot in November, why isn’t the demand that he resign immediately? He’s got roughly 12% of his term remaining.Report
Some people have called for that, believe it or not.
The counter-arguments, as far as I understand, are these:
1. Harris is worse than Biden.
2. It’s not that Harris is worse than Biden, it’s that if Harris becomes President, she has to throw her VP past Congress and that will be too politicized of a process. That process is worse than Biden. It has nothing to do with Harris being worse than Biden.Report
I forgot counter-argument #3.
3. What about Trump?Report
Besides what Jaybird said — Biden is obviously on a trajectory to get worse and worse as time goes on. It’s perfectly reasonable to say he was fine when he was elected, he’s just barely good enough for now, but we should not be signing him up for another *four years* given what we’ve seen & learned.Report
And yet…No one here can summon up an argument for why we should vote for Trump.Report
Funny, the basic argument for Biden is, “he’s not trump”. Frankly, neither is worthily of being voted for.Report
“Biden will preserve democracy and the rule of law, Trump won’t.”
See how easy that is?Report
What does Trump have to do with the question of who the Democrats should have on the ballot in November?Report
Who the Dems have on the ballot is tied to Trump since he is the opposition candidate.Report
To sum an argument FOR TFG is to sum up a set of views that America deserves to be an authoritarian, cis-het white male dominated nation. Admitting that would be deeply unpopular even here.Report
“Biden should resign and Harris should assume the office.”
“You just want an authoritarian, cis-het white male dominated nation!”
The fact that Harris has internalized authoritarian cis-het white maleness might be a problem but it’s one that requires at least a Master’s Degree level understanding of Critical Race Theory.
And I don’t mean the Chris Rufo CRT kinda Critical Race Theory.
I mean the Jean Stefancic, Richard Delgado kinda Critical Race Theory.
And that’s a hard sell. Certainly when the clock is ticking.Report
Pffft. I’m not voting for Trump, but I can at least state the argument for him. If you can’t steel-man an opponent’s argument, you can’t talk meaningfully on the subject.Report
Do it.
State the argument for Trump. I dare you.Report
The argument for Trump?
“Trump won’t be that bad as a president. We already had him as a president once, after all, and things didn’t fall apart until there was a Covid thing and the Covid thing was seriously weird. Stuff was cheaper when he was president and he was funny.”Report
If that’s your steelman, my point is made.Report
Which point was that?
“And yet…No one here can summon up an argument for why we should vote for Trump.”
That one?Report
I don’t need or intend to steel man or straw man an argument for TFG because I don’t want him elected. There is no short term or long term benefit to the nation from another Trump term, and he presents a direct policy threat to me, my family, and others I care deeply about. I take him seriously, as I take Project 2025 seriously. The GOP has made clear who they are, and my moral imperative is to defeat them and their vision in order to protect the country. My personal integrity – to say nothing of my oath of office as a civil servant – demand no less.Report
A lot of people don’t want him elected and can’t speak meaningfully on the topic. You don’t need to make the argument, but you need to be capable of making it, or you can’t speak meaningfully on it either.
ETA: You’ve eagerly straw-manned the argument already.Report
The fact that I choose not to make an argument for authoritarianism doesn’t mean I’m incapable of it. It means I recoil from it morally. It means said argument disgusts me. but I am intellectually capable.Report
The fact that you equate an argument for Trump and an argument for authoritarianism demonstrates that you’re incapable of it.Report
I think this completely misunderstands what the debate is about. The question is whether Joe Biden’s age is going to cost him/the Democrats the election. An election that based on polling he was already not well positioned to win before the debate.
Of course no one at OT is going to make much of a case for Trump, and even our conservatives aren’t particularly Trumpist. People of the type that comment here, whatever their persuasion, aren’t the ones that matter. The ones that do are open to Trump or just no showing out of apathy or the belief that both candidates are so unfit for the office voting doesn’t matter.Report
My problem with the reframing of age is that TFG suffers equally if not more from age issues – even though every rally and speech is a major and possibly intentional Gish Gallop, its clear as day he’s not doing better mentally. And yet no one – here, in the media, or in the GOP is calling for him to step aside. Both because they think they can use him to achieve their objectives politically, and because the GOP is already a fear dominated authoritarian organization. Add to that the fact that many news organizations STILL refuse to report accurately or voluminously on Biden’s success as President, and I remain deeply skeptical of motive. And finally, Biden does as well or better in polling against TFG as any other Democrat with enough prominence to be worth mentioning.
All of which brings me back to why are some democrats and media type rocking this boat now? One debate – one event in a spectrum of events – can’t be the full, complete or only reason. And as such I don’t believe its the right course, especially since Biden has a track record of success as president getting stuff done.Report
I remember when there was a concerted movement to replace Trump with DeSantis.
Believe it or not, people complaining right now about how nobody “is calling for him to step aside” were, at the time that DeSantis appeared to have a shot at replacing Trump, saying that DeSantis was *WORSE* than Trump!
You probably don’t remember that but, for the people that do, lemme tell ya, it’s weird to see people complaining that nobody is calling for Trump to be replaced.
Replaced with who? Someone even *WORSE*?
Why would you want Trump replaced with someone even worse than Trump?Report
The fact that Trump himself is disavowing Project 2025 tells you why.
The entire Republican Party from Trump down to the local school board is committed to authoritarian rule so it doesn’t matter who heads it.Report
so it doesn’t matter who heads it.
This seems to be a good argument for why nobody is calling for Trump to be replaced.
I’ll pass it along to Phil.Report
I think the Yglesias essay posted up above kind of addressed this. A bunch of people did in fact try to remove Trump from the GOP ticket, they just failed. I also think he is probably right that if the GOP had nominated Nikki Haley she would be completely running away with the election right now.
Overall though I think this gets to part of the problem with the way the media has approached Trump. To the voters that are going to decide this there is probably a lot more juice to the indisputable fact that Trump is a crazy old man in clear and steep mental decline than there is to the fact that he is an erratic and authoritarian leader that doesn’t respect the constitution or the rule of law. But because they have gone with the latter they have greatly obscured the former, which is seemingly negated anyway by Biden’s own problems.
Now I do agree with you that it isn’t as obvious to me as it is to others that summarily replacing Biden is the right move. If he were up by a narrow margin I wouldn’t touch it, and there could be something to people just knowing the name ‘Biden.’ But given that isn’t the situation I think all options are fair game.Report
He’s polling inside the margin of error as recently as the end of last week. I don’t know how much closer it needs to be to dispense with the “toss Biden” talk.Report
RCP‘s most recent polls are from Monday.
538 has polls from yesterday.Report
Where are you seeing that? Everything I come across has him down, and many looking worse than before the debate.Report
look at 538 – Biden polls 2-3 points behind Trump in polls that are not noted as leaning any particular way with margins of error 2-3 points.
This week’s Emerson college polling shows every other democrat they could come up with as polling worse. Only Michelle Obama polls better in last weeks Ipsos poll – and she is not going to run or be drafted.Report
Fair enough.Report
I’m open to the argument that Harris would be a stronger candidate but so far the Democratic Party base doesn’t seem interested in making that happen.
So the choice for any persuadable voter in November is between Biden and Trump.Report
The best shot for Harris is if Biden has a medical setback and leaves not just the campaign, but the office, making her the incumbent, able to pick up the existing organization and money.Report
There are three levels of “strength” for the argument: that he isn’t capable of handling the presidency now, that he isn’t capable of handling the rigors of campaigning, and that he shows every indication of not being capable of handling the presidency through a second term. Although, I guess depending on what you think about campaigning and being president, maybe the last two could be switched. I don’t think he’s capable of handling the presidency now. There’s no guilt in getting old, although it can feel embarrassing. We spend most of our lives either doing A or feeling guilty for being too lazy to do A. When seniors see themselves not doing A, they feel guilty, even though they simply can’t do it any more.Report
Democrats: “Republicans are advocating Christian Nationalism!”
Republicans: “That’s a dirty smear!”
Josh Hawley “I’m advocating Christian nationalism!”
https://www.rawstory.com/josh-hawley-im-advocating-christian-nationalism/Report
NYT is reporting: A Wall Street Law Firm Wants to Define Consequences of Israel Protests
Sullivan & Cromwell is now doing background checks on applicants and seeing if they participated in the Lawful Good Protests that protested Genocide.
If your attitude is “you guys still care about that?”, well… apparently they do. The folks at this firm apparently has a looooong memory.Report
How things change. Time was when these firms wouldn’t hire Jews.Report
Yeah, someone pointed out that Sullivan & Cromwell was literally Hitler’s law firm.Report
A figurative use of “literally,” I suspect. S&C certainly represented various German companies during the Nazi era, doing for them what it would do for U.S. Steel or British Petroleum, but a quick search hasn’t come up with anything it did for Hitler or the German government generally.Report
Krupp A.G. and I.G. Farben appear to be drawing the worst ire.Report
Indeed. Under a different German regime, they would be just the sort of foreign corporate clients that a firm like S&C or any of its peers would represent.Report
I can imagine that there are applicants who agree wholeheartedly with that and there are other applicants who disagree venomously with that.
The ones who disagree venomously are likely to self-select away and the ones who are more understanding are more likely to make a good fit at the firm.Report
There are people who don’t want to do the standard work of BigLaw corporate firms for their normal clients. German arms manufacturers, American tobacco companies, hedge funds, whatever. If they don’t want to do that work, they shouldn’t, at least not until they’ve banked enough BigLaw bucks to make a dent on their loans.Report
On the off chance that you have missed the cover of the latest New Republic, I hope you now take this opportunity to enjoy it:
Report
Hey JB, is it being a moral scold to point out that a Turning Point USA employee/ambassador is tweeting out Holocaust Denial or is Mr. Kilgore just a poor innocent lamb just asking questions?
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/07/grims-fairytalesReport
Turning Point USA? Which one is that? Oh, that’s Charlie Kirk’s.
Let’s read the post… Okay. So Ryan Grim tweeted this out:
My first thought when I read that tweet was that it wasn’t about Holocaust Denial at all and I was wondering why it was in the story.
I mean, I remember talking about how Hillary Clinton was an awful, awful candidate in 2016 and how a decent opposition would have beaten Trump… but, of course, there’s no reason to re-argue that. I was surprised to see so much vitriol towards someone saying “Donald Trump is a genuinely bad presidential candidate with glaring vulnerabilities.”
That seems obviously true.
But, of course, it’s not enough. So they had to jump down the guy’s throat for saying that a decent political party would have beaten Trump because that means that the Democrats aren’t a decent political party and, of course, that’s an insult that cannot be borne, despite the whole admission that Trump’s an awful candidate.
So that’s got some moral scolding going on there too. “You shouldn’t think that Trump is bad like that, you should think that he’s EVEN WORSE LIKE THIS!”
But let’s keep reading the post…
Okay. After complaining about the moral awfulness of not thinking Trump is sufficiently awful, they compare that to holocaust denial.
The moral seriousness just oozes.
So Insufficient criticism of Trump is like Holocaust Denial?
Huh.Report
Q: “What do you think of Evan Kilgore?”
A: *waves sparkler in the other hand* “Lets talk about Ryan Grim!”Report
“Here, read this post!”
“Okay.”
“NO NOT THE WHOLE THING!!!”
I think that Evan Kilgore’s tweet is bad? And I think that pointing it out in the same breath as someone insufficiently criticizing Trump makes light of Holocaust Denial…
In the same way that comparing Trump to Hitler trivializes WWII and, yes, the Holocaust.
Do you see the comparisons as treating the topic particularly seriously?Report
It was a yes or no question Jaybird. Provide a yes or no answer.Report
Oh, okay.
No.Report
Grim is wrong and doesn’t want to acknowledge that there is a strong plurality of Americans that support fascism and neither do you because it means supporting Democrats and that is just icky,
And you bait and switch is revealing and not in good ways,Report
I agree with Grim, though. Donald Trump *IS* a genuinely bad presidential candidate with glaring vulnerabilities.
Any reasonably serious political opposition *WOULD* have dispatched him in 2016.
Instead we got Clinton. Who was awful.Report
Clinton was the preferred candidate of the entire Democratic Party and won the popular vote.Report
She might yet win:
https://www.aol.com/news/kamala-harris-pulls-ahead-joe-152835091.html
On the other hand, Al Gore is younger than either Biden or Trump.Report
There’s so much revealing in this tweet. But the most telling is the belief that Trumpism simply doesn’t exist, merely an outgrowth of Democrats poor candidate selection and general ineptitude. Makes every decision obvious and easy, as long as you don’t actually control anything.-Josh Marshall on GrimmReport
Marshall has his opinion.Report
It’s a variation of Lee’s Secret Disney Liberal view, that no one could possibly prefer illiberalism to liberalism.
So therefore illiberalism is the fault of liberals for being in sufficiently savvy/skilled/etc.
The absurdity of the assertion that “Any reasonably serious political opposition *WOULD* have dispatched him” is to ask, “by what percentage would this victory been?”
Would Candidate Serious have won in a 1964 landslide?
This is preposterous and no one who thinks so should be taken seriously.
So, maybe a solid 55%/45% 30 state victory?
OK but this admits that even in the best case scenario, around 45% of the electorate, given a clear choice, would choose authoritarianism.Report
There is a Further Left form of Secret Disney Liberalism that basically believes that a lot of the country goes to the Republicans or other Further Right groups because the Democratic Party or whatever the center-left party is does not give people the further left candidates that they really want, so they have no choice but to vote fascist.
The difference between Further Left Secret Disney Liberals and Center Left Secret Disney liberals is that the Further Left type sees the solution as political while the Center Left type sees it as cultural and education. The Center Left Secret Disney Liberal believes that you just need to make the right argument and maybe include some dopey songs about healing in order to get the inner liberal to awaken.Report
It might be more disappointing to see it in the left, since one of the left’s main contribution has been to document how illiberal the American people have been throughout history, and how unpopular liberalism actually is.Report
This would mean that would have to admit that Further Leftism would be even more unpopular though and that they are politically impotent in the United States at least.Report
One of the reasons why the I/P conflict has been so intractable is that too many people have a bad tendency to mythologize the conflict. We are most familiar with the Evangelicals seeing Israel as necessary for Christ’s second coming. Below is an example of the mythologization of the I/P conflict from the Intersectional Left perspective where Israel is the source of all the evil in the world including but not limited to the Patriarchy, Global Capitalism, Racism, and White Supremacy. How does this solve anything? You aren’t going to get Israeli Jews in particular or Jews in general to go lighter on the Palestinians by arguing that half the world’s Jewish population is the source of all evil. Most Jews are going to see this chart as anti-Semitic against all Jews but from Leftist rather than Rightist world view:
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c4158af0a3d618930339633129da774cf9dc02d76b2e2dc97bbce1e921ab1b97.pngReport
The DSC NPC has withdrawn its endorsement of AOC.
Kill your idols, guys.Report
When you adequately fund the IRS to do its job, revenue goes up:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/07/11/millionaires-unpaid-taxes-irs/Report
There’s a group of folks out there… younger Gen-X, older Millennials who are really into Jon Stewart. Like, he’s their Walter Cronkite. The Daily Show era was great, wasn’t it?
Anyways, he’s got another take on Biden.
Don’t worry, he included stuff about how Trump is bad too.Report
Stewart hardly touched the primaries argument. As for the other stuff, maybe he shouldn’t argue that (a) Biden’s been in obvious decline for years, (b) Stewart had no idea how bad the debate would be, and (c) other people are lying to you, in the same segment.Report
Stewart gave a nice strong eye-roll and pointed out that the primaries argument is, how do you say, “balderdash”.
As for the whole a, b, and c thing, we got into this with Yggy and Eigen.
It’s easy to dismiss someone else’s criticism as being partisan. It’s an overstatement. Sure, Biden has slowed down but he’s not *SENILE*. You’re exaggerating. What about Trump? And then you see the debate.
Sure, Republicans have been making jokes about Biden being senile for the last 4 years but THEY’RE REPUBLICANS. Heck, just a couple of days prior to the debate, footage of Biden looking old and lost got called “cheapfakes” by the White House Press Secretary. Yeah, that’s as good a term as any for footage taken out of context. Biden is fine. Remember the State of the Union? What about Trump?
And then the debate happened.
The debate was *BAD*.
The main ego defense that most people came up with immediately was “HOW COME WE DID NOT KNOW THIS?” and… well, at that point, you have to ask yourself “what’s my goal?”
Is your goal to get them to clam up and embrace their ego defenses more? Yell that the Republicans have known about this for the last four years and they’re stupid.
Get them to talk about how they honestly didn’t know it was this bad? Well, offer tea and sympathy and talk about how the press is pretty partisan sometimes and sometimes it’s partisan to the point where it doesn’t even know that it’s doing harm to an *HONEST* progressive agenda.
If you want to get them to agree that Biden should be replaced… well, the best way to argue that isn’t to argue that, I think.
The best way to argue that is to show them that the view that Biden should be replaced is fashionable.Report
This sounds a lot like a conversation we had about nine months ago, where I was saying that Israel’s enemies had always been barbarians, and you made the very human argument that the demonstration of the thing had changed the equation. We probably had the same conversation before that, about zero Baltimore students passing an exam, or about celebrity politicians not wearing masks.Report
What got me to wander away from my unwavering support for Israel to a much wobblier one was not the retracted-two-days-later headlines explaining that Israel bombed a hospital or the casualty reports that grudgingly concede that the list of names of people shot included the guys guarding hostages but the Israeli footage taken by Israelis showing Israeli soldiers taking a china set out of a cabinet and throwing the tea cups on the floor.
It reframed it for me. “These guys aren’t trying to rescue hostages. They’re not even getting revenge for hippiechicks getting killed on 10/7. They’re putting the Palestinians back in their place.”
It’s the little things that move the margins.Report
I’ll acknowledge that a 1993 Bill Clinton covered in vaseline wouldn’t be able to slide through tonight’s press conference. A waver in a voice, an otherwise-common deflection, a flash of temper at the twelfth identical question about his fitness…it’s a nightmare. The little moments that fit the new narrative are inevitable.Report
A friend from my hometown recently spotted a pro-Palestinian demonstrated cosplaying as an Ultra-Orthodox Jew eating in McDonalds. These people really don’t have any shame.Report
You know the movie Trembling Before G-d? Maybe this is like that.
Only with cheeseburgers.Report
Very funny. The main point being is that many of the Jews at Pro-Palestinian rallies are not Jews at all but cosplayers. The fact that these cosplayers are tolerated or seen as an important part among the types that keep ranting about cultural appropriation is not a good look. If Jewish women dressed up in hiabs and burqas carrying signs that Muslims for Israel it would be called out fast.Report
Well, the WaPo opines that there’s a ceasefire within reach. A US-trained Palestinian security force that is supported by Moderate Arab Countries in the region that ain’t Hamas and ain’t Israeli.
If the administration pulls this off, we’ll see a whole bunch of Orthodox cosplayers poof go up in smoke.
(Do they have sidelocks? Say what you will about sidelocks but they’re hard to fake in a short period of time.)Report
Watching how people deal with cognitive dissonance tends to be, in my experience, the best way to learn about them.Report
The last thing Joe needed:
Report
I feel like that’s a gaffe he was fully capable of making 30 years ago.Report
Absolutely.
And 30 years ago, it’d have been funny as hell. “President Gorbachev! I mean Yeltsin!”
“Oh, that Joe!”Report
I think this is the “Rabbit or Duck” phenomenon that Yglesias was talking about — individually you could explain these away, but after the debate performance it’s hard not to see them all as evidence of his decline.Report
Yup.Report
The O’s were getting killed so I braved the last 15 minutes of the press conference. It didn’t help Biden’s cause either.Report
I watched a few clips. Probably won’t change anyone’s mind one way or the other — moments of confusion, some decent answers (though he just seems so old and tired).
Interesting tidbit on the NYT:
This makes sense to me — I’ve seen some Blue MAGA types say that Trump wants Biden out (as a reason for Dems to support him), but i can’t imagine Trump would be anything but thrilled to have Biden stay in the race. He has a treasure trove of photos and clips and editorials available to use in ads to question his fitness.Report
Also interesting that he said Harris was a good VP but not ready to be president — seems like that might come back to bite either him or her. Even if he stays in, there can’t be many people out there who think he’s likely to last four years — her being ready is part of his story in November but not so much right now.Report
“Solid enough”
That is some quality faint praise, right there.Report
I found myself pulling for him to make it through one of his stories without botching it. There’s no freude to be had in the schaden.Report
I’m more committed to NATO than my predecessor, because I lived twice as long before it.Report
Thanks to Related Post Roulette, I was pointed to this post from October 2016.
In the comments, Trumwill pointed to a story about a couple of senators who had been calling for Trump to step down… but, you know, as we got closer to the election, they pivoted from “he should step down” to “of course I’m going to vote for him”.
We thought that that was so funny back then.
Anyway, yesterday, Vermont’s Peter Welch called for Biden to step down.Report
The Paul Ryan video problem seems to have been solved. Many Americans are worried about the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025. Democratic politicians find it something useful to focus on during the elections.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/07/11/project-2025-democrats/Report
New York Times is reporting: Donors Said to Freeze Roughly $90 Million as Long as Biden Stays in Race.
There are 45 million registered democrats. If each of them donated $2, they could counteract this act of election interference.Report
Big Donors. Biden has been doing well with small donors since the debate. And frankly, this just makes it easier for Biden to portray it as the elites vs. him.Report
Project 2025 is so scary that People Magazine, the most apolitical magazine in the United States, has a big article devoted to it and how bad it is:
https://people.com/what-is-project-2025-inside-far-right-plan-trump-presidency-8622964Report
This is good.
People Magazine reaches the low info voters, the ones who don’t read the NYT or know who Matt Yglesias is.Report
People I know who never post about politics are posting anti-Project 2025 posts. I’ve never seen so many people talk about politics like this. Project 2025 will hopefully be the reactionaries grabbing the car.Report
It must be the biggest political story in the past month!Report
“The most apolitical magazine in the United States” has a “Lead News Editor, Politics”, the article’s author, Kyler Alvord. He seems apolitical:
https://www.collegemagazine.com/10-songs-help-cope-2016-election-results/Report
The magazine being apolitical is different than the writers being apolitical. After the 2016 election, I believe that People had an article about Trump’s cute grandkids.Report
I don’t follow People magazine, so I don’t know when they began political coverage. But if an organization has political coverage, it’s political, right? Not necessarily ideological or partisan, but political.Report
The Manslaughter Case against Alex Baldwin was dismissed with prejudice after what sounds like a pretty egregious violation of the Brady Rule: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/12/arts/rust-trial-pause-alec-baldwin-shooting.htmlReport
That’s a shame, because what Baldwin did on set was straight up negligence BEFORE he pulled the trigger.Report
As a producer he is at least civilly liable I agreeReport
Moms for Liberty seeks order blocking federal LGBTQ school protections nationwide
https://www.lawdork.com/p/moms-for-liberty-seeks-order-blocking
Tl;Dr: God Hates Fags pretty much sums it up.Report
The only thing that is somewhat surprising is that they didn’t file in Texas.Report
Russia commits war crimes, yet again:
Russian missile attack kills 37 in Ukraine, hits children’s hospital
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/07/08/russian-missile-attack-ukraine-childrens-hospital/
A Russian missile attack hit cities across Ukraine on Monday, killing at least 37 people and injuring 170 people. Among those killed were three children, said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who decried “Russian terrorists” after the “brutal” attack.
The Republicans wearing “Better Russian Than Democrat!” tee shirts were not immediately available for comment.Report
The Taliban grapples with climate change:
While Taliban beliefs are rooted in centuries-old Pashtun culture and an extreme interpretation of Islam, the government affirms that climate change is real, that it’s destroying God’s work and that those in the world who reject the truth of climate change need to get on board. The Taliban has asked imams in Afghanistan’s tens of thousands of mosques to emphasize during Friday prayers the need for environmental protection.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/07/12/afghanistan-taliban-climate-change/
Lets stop for a moment and reflect on this.
The Taliban, those backward primitive barbarians, are handling climate change more honestly and forthrightly than the Republican Party in America.Report
It kind of helps that there aren’t members of the Taliban that stand to lose billions by taking climate change seriously. Western climate change denial is based a lot on this. Climate change also poses a general challenge to the notion of economic and material progress that basically every form of Western political ideology believes in. The Taliban benefit from people being kept in material poverty and focused on Islam.Report
In the US It’s all about the Benjamins. At this point though the biggest challenges aren’t western politics. It’s that the severity of the outcomes are almost completely in the hands of China and India, not the west. All we can do is develop and help to mature the technology that they may or may not use to mitigate.Report