Polls continuously show that RFK Jr inexplicably garners from 10 to 15% of the vote. We don’t really have a good idea whether he draws more from Trump or Biden but it’s a terrible risk to have him on the ballot. He’s crazy and he just doesn’t care. Vanity Fair has a new profile of him and it’s actually disgusting. I don’t know if the crazy people who are saying they’ll vote for him will ever know about it but what it says might even make them think twice. Here’s just one little excerpt: Last year Robert Kennedy Jr. texted a photograph to a friend. In the photo RFK Jr. was posing, alongside an unidentified woman, with the barbecued remains of what appears to be a dog. Kennedy told the person, who was traveling to Asia, that he might enjoy a restaurant in Korea that served dog on the menu, suggesting Kennedy had sampled dog. The photo was taken in 2010, according to the digital file’s metadata—the same year he was diagnosed with a dead tapeworm in his brain.
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What are you prepared to do to stop it? The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday all but guaranteed this country has dictatorship in its future. If not under “your favorite president,” as Trump the imperial might say, then under another, smarter, more skilled autocrat. “[T]his ruling is a brazen and dangerous expansion of presidential power in ways that entrench a deep climate of impunity,” constitutional scholar Aziz Rana tells The Ink. But you knew that. Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen report at Axios that if elected Trump will “immediately test the boundaries of presidential and governing power.” (What boundaries?) Axios: There’s more if you have the stomach for it. This toxic, authoritarian movement, for all it’s flag-waving and pretensions to patriotism, is anything but American. And never was. It is a knife to the throat of this republic. There are people in this country who want a dictator and a one-party state. Some of them wear black robes and accept bribes. But the bribes are just a perk. They are true believers in something other than the Constitution they are tasked for life with interpreting.
It’s Gilead rising This didn’t get much notice but it’s telling: The only three Republican women in the South Carolina Senate took on their party and stopped a total abortion ban from passing in their state last year. In return, they lost their jobs. Voters removed Sens. Sandy Senn, Penry Gustafson and Katrina Shealy from office during sparsely turned out primaries in June, and by doing so completely vacated the Republican wing of the five-member “Sister Senators,” a female contingent that included two Democrats and was joined in their opposition to the abortion ban. For Republicans, the departure of Senn, Gustafson and Shealy likely means there will be no women in the majority party of state Senate when the next session starts in 2025. It could also mean that women will not wield power for decades in the fiercely conservative state where they have long struggled to gain entry into the Legislature. As South Carolina goes, so goes the nation — under Trump and the Supremes. They’re just going for it.
He’s immune from the rule of law and he can pardon any soldier who follows his orders.
We’re starting to get the first real post-debate polling. Today CNN released its poll. It doesn’t show any change in voter intentions but 75% of people say they think the Dems would have a better chance with a different candidate. In a matchup between the presumptive major-party nominees, voters nationwide favor former President Donald Trump over Biden by 6 points, 49% to 43%, identical to the results of CNN’s national poll on the presidential race in April, and consistent with the lead Trump has held in CNN polling back to last fall. Not exactly good news, of course. But it’s not the free-fall many expected. (CNN’s poll has had Trump leading by much more than any of the others for months.) However, there is this, which is intriguing: The poll also finds Vice President Kamala Harris within striking distance of Trump in a hypothetical matchup: 47% of registered voters support Trump, 45% Harris, a result within the margin of error that suggests there is no clear leader under such a scenario.
Vance said that while he thinks presidents (read: Republicans) should have immunity, it would be up to future Attorney General to decide if Biden should be prosecuted for crimes. I think he undoubtedly speaks for the entire GOP on that. It won’t be hard for them to find a loophole that allows such a thing if Trump is in the driver’s seat. Amanda Marcotte at Salon had a good piece on this today. An excerpt: For all the people who are semi-joking that President Joe Biden now has a legal right to have the military assassinate Trump, Chief Justice John Roberts gave himself an out. Roberts insists that the president “is not above the law.” It can still be a crime if the court determines that the behavior falls outside of “his official acts.” But what makes something an official act?
Pathetic: The “Biden is a basket case but also Joseph Stalin” line is more unsustainable than ever. But I guess they’re still rolling with it. Also, the transition was anything but smooth. Even aside from the obvious — the coup attempt and insurrection —they wouldn’t hold meetings for the new team to prepare, Trump refused the normal courtesy of meeting the Biden’s at the White house and he churlishly refused to attend the inauguration, It was a shitshow from beginning to end. The relatively muted response from Republicans in the wake of the debate is curious and very unlike them. Dancing on graves is their favorite pastime. Maybe they’re thrown off by the Democrats’ hysterics and don’t yet know how to respond? I suppose it’s possible they’re following the old “when your opponent is destroying himself, let him” but that would be unusual too. Piling on is their second favorite pastime. Weird. We got some Dear Leader tweets from Steven Miller early on but he’s just been doing his standard grotesque immigrant bashing the last day or so. Trump put out this whine yesterday: Poor Trumpie.
If there’s one bright spot in the very dark weekend just passed it’s that we didn’t have to hear much from Donald Trump and his henchmen. He was very unhappy about that and whined on his Truth Social platform that nobody was giving him the credit he deserved: Mostly he’s just been yelling at the clouds while his people have been keeping a low profile. It’s been years since we’ve had such a respite and it almost makes the hell of this Biden debate debacle bearable. Almost. It’s been a very rough few days and from the looks of it it’s not going to let up any time soon. We’re still awaiting the poll results to see if voters have decided to vote for Trump in light of Biden’s miserable debate performance last Thursday. We’ve seen some numbers that show more people think he shouldn’t run for president again than said that last month but the number was always pretty high. (A majority say the same thing about Trump although fewer than say it about Biden.) But we haven’t yet seen the effects of the debate on voter preferences.
America, 2024. Newsweek: Taylor Swift is now the most influential celebrity in America. Her popularity is staggering, and her position as a cultural colossus is unquestionable. At 34, Swift remains unmarried and childless, a fact that some might argue is irrelevant to her status as a role model. But, I suggest, it’s crucial to consider what kind of example this sets for young girls. A role model, by definition, is someone worthy of imitation. While Swift’s musical talent and business acumen are certainly admirable, even laudable, we must ask if her personal life choices are ones we want our sisters and daughters to emulate. This might sound like pearl-clutching preaching, but it’s a concern rooted in sound reasoning. Here’s that sound reasoning: Swift’s highly publicized romantic life has been a source of prime tabloid fodder for years. She has dated numerous high-profile men—at least a dozen—including the singers Harry Styles and Joe Jonas, the actor Jake Gyllenhaal, and, more recently, the American football player Travis Kelce.
Apropos of nothing, I thought I’d just share this piece from Vox about the NY Times and Hitler: On November 21, 1922, the New York Times published its very first article about Adolf Hitler. It’s an incredible read — especially its assertion that “Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not so violent or genuine as it sounded.” This attitude was, apparently, widespread among Germans at the time; many of them saw Hitler’s anti-Semitism as a ploy for votes among the German masses. Times correspondent Cyril Brown spends most of the piece documenting the factors behind Hitler’s early rise in Bavaria, Germany, including his oratorical skills. For example: “He exerts an uncanny control over audiences, possessing the remarkable ability to not only rouse his hearers to a fighting pitch of fury, but at will turn right around and reduce the same audience to docile coolness.” But the really extraordinary part of the article is the three paragraphs on anti-Semitism.