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Created
Fri, 01/11/2024 - 06:30
Last night I posted that the Dodgers winning the World Series wasa good omen because they won last in 2020 and Joe Biden was victorious as well. It’s silly. But just for fun here’s some more: While the stock market is not necessarily representative of the broader economy, the S&P 500’s performance in the run-up to Election Day has historically been a strong indicator of whether the incumbent party’s candidate will retain control of the White House — correctly forecasting all but four presidential races over the last 96 years. If the index is falling, the theory goes, investors are bracing for more uncertainty from a new administration. But a climb in the S&P 500 signals that the market is expecting the current president’s party to win. And the index’s recent rise is suggesting that Vice President Kamala Harris, who took over the Democratic ticket from President Joe Biden this summer, could be bound for victory. While the weirdo billionaires are betting on Orange Julius Caesar, the actual day-to-day money people are betting with their wallets on Harris. Good to know.
Created
Fri, 01/11/2024 - 05:00
Look at that nonsense. David Kurtz at TPM writes: In the final week of the presidential campaign, the country’s two most prominent newspapers extended into a second day their credulous coverage of Republicans’ fake outrage over President Biden’s “garbage” comment. The NYT and WaPo each made it a front-page story in Thursday’s editions, with above-the-fold, prime-real-estate treatment. Considering that Trump routinely calls Harris voters scum, garbage vermin and worse this is journalistic malpractice. Have they ever put his comments above the fold like that in this campaign even once, much less in the final week? I don’t think so. Josh Marshall put it like this: It’s actually a long time GOP tactic, one of their most infuriating, not because they do it but because the mainstream media falls for it every time. And sometimes the Democrats do too. I wrote about this years ago: The Art Of The Hissy FitBy digby Tuesday, October 23, 2007 That was written years before Trump became a political figure. Maybe someday the media will stop falling for it.
Created
Fri, 01/11/2024 - 04:30
Trump has bee basically calling Kamala Harris a dumb whore ever since she became the nominee. Here he is today: Meanwhile: Women are insulted by that threat, and a threat it is. Especially from him: Guess what? There’s a new kind of gender gap in the 2024 election: Women are voting early in huge numbers, far outpacing men. It’s giving anxious Democrats — who see female voters as key to a Kamala Harris victory — newfound hope heading into the final week of the campaign. Across battlegrounds, there is a 10-point gender gap in early voting so far: Women account for roughly 55 percent of the early vote, while men are around 45 percent, according to a POLITICO analysis of early vote data in several key states. The implications for next week’s election results are unclear; among registered Republicans, women are voting early more than men, too. But the high female turnout is encouraging to Democratic strategists, who expected that a surge in Republican turnout would result in more gender parity among early voters.
Created
Fri, 01/11/2024 - 01:56

Kit Klarenberg explores the 1984 conference that fortified Israel's narrative control, highlighting the troubling dynamics between media, politics, and public perception in the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The post How a Secluded 1984 Conference Forged Israel’s Unprecedented Influence Over US Media appeared first on MintPress News.

Created
Fri, 01/11/2024 - 01:30
Trump? Not so much. As I said, we have the press underfoot at Democratic headquarters in Asheville. We’re damned good at get-out-the-vote operations. (I wrote a guide for it.) The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank came to visit and saw for himself (on a day I wasn’t at HQ): Forty thousand volunteers have signed up since Harris became the candidate, on top of those who were already volunteering for Biden. The Harris campaign has been running four shifts of daily canvassing here — at 9 a.m., noon, 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. — in which hundreds of volunteers knock on thousands of doors. Last week, campaign volunteers knocked on more than 100,000 doors and made more than 1.8 million phone calls in North Carolina alone. Comparable efforts are underway in every swing state. Scamming the scammer Speaking of comparisons. And the Trump campaign? Well, it seems to be accomplishing a whole lot of nothing on the ground. As the Republican nominee spent a lot of the campaign hawking sneakers and trading cards to enrich himself and turning the Republican National Committee into a cult of personality, he neglected to build a field operation.
Created
Fri, 01/11/2024 - 00:30

Donald Trump was the worst president for Black people in the modern era, if not the nation’s history. Given a life of unremitting racial animus, under no circumstances should he receive a single vote from the Black community or other communities of color. After all, he’s never moderated his white nationalist sentiments and count on this: he never will. Yet, somehow, he has indeed managed to win support from a sliver of the Black community. In 2016, he captured 6% of its vote and that rose to 8% in his losing effort four years later. No, those weren’t the large numbers he claimed he would win, but given who he is and what he’s done his entire life, including during... Read more

Source: The Black Case Against Donald Trump appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

Created
Fri, 01/11/2024 - 00:17

Israel’s actions against journalists raise alarm as media casualties reach unprecedented numbers, surpassing WWII and Vietnam combined, with Western media still backing the alarming attacks on press freedom.

The post Israel’s War Claims More Journalists Than WWII and Vietnam Combined appeared first on MintPress News.

Created
Fri, 01/11/2024 - 00:00
Previews of coming infections “Women are voting early in huge numbers, far outpacing men,” Politico reports this week. Among the reasons why? Pregnant women are dying. ProPublica has the story of yet another tragic, preventable death. Josseli Barnica was 28: Josseli Barnica grieved the news as she lay in a Houston hospital bed on Sept. 3, 2021: The sibling she’d dreamt of giving her daughter would not survive this pregnancy. The fetus was on the verge of coming out, its head pressed against her dilated cervix; she was 17 weeks pregnant and a miscarriage was “in progress,” doctors noted in hospital records. At that point, they should have offered to speed up the delivery or empty her uterus to stave off a deadly infection, more than a dozen medical experts told ProPublica. But when Barnica’s husband rushed to her side from his job on a construction site, she relayed what she said the medical team had told her: “They had to wait until there was no heartbeat,” he told ProPublica in Spanish.
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Fri, 01/11/2024 - 00:00

Our friends at 270 Reasons are gathering a polyphonic orchestra of brilliant writers, teachers, doctors, filmmakers, artists, and citizens of all kinds to weigh in about their plans to vote this November. These opinion essays run the gamut from advocacy for basic human rights to acutely personal mini-manifestoes. Read the rest over at 270 Reasons.

Created
Thu, 31/10/2024 - 23:00

I realize the former president can sound a bit rough to some, but that’s why he connects with so many people. He simply tells it like it is. He’s a man of conviction who will not do the terrible things he has repeatedly promised to do. This is why I plan to vote for him.

As a man who served as president for four years, who is the head of the Republican Party, and who controls the entire messaging machine of the conservative media ecosystem, Donald Trump is the ultimate outsider and truth-teller who can take on the system. He’s the only one who can fix this amazing country, which is the garbage can for the world, according to Trump.

Created
Thu, 31/10/2024 - 22:54
Donald Trump has made very public threats to persecute his political opponents should he be re-elected and statements by him and by other leading Republicans suggests that he might persecute others on the grounds of their religion or their membership of certain social groups. If this were happen (rather than simply being bluster) then it […]