You may recall that he said this yesterday: Check out this piece by Jill Lawrence in the LA Times. She recently went to Los Alamos and suggests that people should stay away during this presidential election because you won’t be able to sleep at night: President Truman followed through with the plan to use the bombs that ended World War II. Truman could have stopped it. He didn’t, but right afterward he ordered that presidential permission was required for such action, and his administration made it official policy in a 1948 memo: U.S. presidents had the sole authority to launch nuclear weapons. If a president gives the word, the military must obey. That’s even if America has not been attacked, and even if a president is demonstrably unfit. A president, for instance, such as Trump, whose reckless, divisive term ended with his loyalists — at his urging — staging a deadly attack on the Capitol to try to keep him in power after he lost the 2020 election. “President Trump’s last terrifying weeks in office have been a wake-up call. Never again should we allow a dangerous president to have unilateral control over nuclear launch,” Sen.
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I don’t know how much time you have to listen to podcasts but if you’re interested in the minutia of the electoral college vote and are worried about Pennsylvania, this one with Greg Sargent interviewing Gov. Josh Shapiro may be up your alley. An excerpt: If Kamala Harris can defeat Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, she almost certainly will win the presidency. It’s must-win for him. Yet the state remains a coin-flip—which is why both candidates campaigned in the state this week. So what is Harris’s path to victory? We talked to Governor Josh Shapiro, who explained why the race is so close—and why he thinks she’s “on her way” to winning there, in part due to concerted communications with non-college voters. Shapiro also responded at length to Trump’s lies about Haitian immigrants living in Pennsylvania, pronouncing them “utter bullshit.” Here is the whole thing: I know the polls show a very close race. But as I wrote in an earlier post,
To the Editors: In his otherwise excellent essay on the “tragic flaw” in Shakespeare’s tragedies [“No Comfort,” NYR, June 6], Fintan O’Toole falls into the all too common trap of attributing this critical idea to Aristotle. But the words Aristotle uses, hamartia and hamartēma, often mistranslated as “flaw,” do not refer to a character’s psychology […]
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Ben Wikler, the head of the Wisconsin Democratic Party tweeted this this morning: Vice President Harris joined Wisconsin Public Radio and talked about what she’d do as president: * affordable housing* water quality* reproductive rights … and more. Everyone should know what she said: Okay, let’s dig into the Harris interview with Kate Archer Kent of “Wisconsin Today” on @WPR. (above) The first question in the @KamalaHarris interview on Wisconsin Public Radio was on a topic on *many* voters’ minds: Wisconsin’s shortage of affordable housing. Wisconsin Today (WT) to VP Harris: “The medium home price in our state has jumped by 41% since September of 2020. You proposed up to $25,000 in down payment assistance for first time homebuyers. What would it take to be eligible for that type of assistance?” Harris answered directly: to qualify for the $25,000 in down payment assistance, you just have to be a first-time homebuyer.Again. Buying your first home? $25,000 in down payment assistance.This will change a lot of lives. This will help more folks buy homes—which, naturally, will increase demand.
“This is the feeling we want to hold onto” Didn’t know Anthony Ramos before. I do now. “Why would we not want to hold onto this feeling?” Enjoy.
Trump has a new chant at his rallies: “Send Them Back!” Isn’t that great? Former president Donald Trump continued attacking the immigrant population in an Ohio town during a campaign rally Monday in Pennsylvania, saying, “You have to get them the hell out.” As Trump spoke in Indiana, Pa., the crowd chanted, “Send them back!” For weeks now, Trump has singled out Springfield, Ohio, over its Haitian population, echoing baseless claims that immigrants are eating pets and calling the immigrants illegal, despite their legal status. His attacks have upended life in the small town, where the Republican mayor has pleaded for civility amid bomb threats and event cancellations for security reasons.
How far he’s come from humble beginnings I lived for a stretch in Sen. Lindsey Graham’s one-stoplight hometown in South Carolina. He tended bar in the restaurant/bar/pool hall/liquor store his parents owned. A neighbor was converting an old church into a home and building a second floor out over the sanctuary (above). Checking Google Maps, there’s nothing left now of the decrepit “ghost house” we lived in but the foundation. They’ve moved the police department and post office out of “downtown.” Built some apartments for university kids. Not a lot else has changed. But Lindsey Graham sure has. From The ReidOut blog: Appearing on Fox News, Sen. Lindsey Graham tried his hardest to separate Donald Trump from the controversy surrounding North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson. The South Carolina Republican is predictably standing by his man Trump, but the irony in his excuses is too obvious to ignore.
Just say no Hello. My name is digby and I am a poll addict. I really wish I wasn’t because I’m not equipped to deal with commentary like that above from the person who runs 538. I am an ordinary person caught in the vortex of a close election and I may just end up losing my mind over it. Don’t go there if you value your sanity. Historian Rick Perlstein has a great column on polls today that you really should read. (And then go read some fiction or watch the game or do some phone banking. Anything but look at those damned polling averages.) W. Joseph Campbell’s Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections demonstrates—for the first time, strangely enough, given the robust persuasiveness of its conclusions—that presidential polls are almost always wrong, consistently, in deeply patterned ways. Unusual for any historical narrative, the pattern is almost unchanged for a good hundred years. First, someone comes forth with some new means of measuring how people will vote for president, and gets it so right it feels like magic.
Oh right. She’s a woman. How could I forget? You just can’t underestimate misogyny. And, by the way, a lot of people wearing these degenerate t-shirts and carrying these signs happen to be MAGA women. As depressing as this is, the subtext of this election is that Donald Trump is a real man and Kamala Harris is a dumb whore.
JD Vance and Project 2025 are all over his latest “I am your protector” rhetoric As a politician, Donald Trump has always exhibited a very creepy form of paternalism. He often says things like “No one has done as much for the Black community as I did” or “I’ve been better for Jews than anyone in history.” It’s as if he’s bestowing on the people a special gift from the king and they should be grateful to him personally. Of course his boasts are always lies so they tend to fall on deaf ears, but it reveals how he sees himself as president. Although he’s long exhibited this rhetorical tic, in recent days he’s really outdone himself. Sounding much more like a cult leader than a politician in a modern democracy, the passages in his speeches about women are downright disturbing. It started with a weird Truth Social post on September 20th: The womenfolk are depressed but Big Daddy Trump is going to fix all that and they’ll be so happy they won’t even think about abortion. “THEY WILL FINALLY BE HEALTHY, HOPEFUL, SAFE AND SECURE.