The kitchen table is on fire Lewis Rothschild : People want leadership, Mr. President, and in the absence of genuine leadership, they’ll listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone. Donald Trump steps up to the microphone a lot. But to Americans too busy to listen, too overworked to devote their precious free time to political news, they hear only the loudest voices and feel how the world feels. To them. They’ll be asked this fall to hire leaders. From the president on down to the local school board. What they want in their leaders are people who will fight for them. It’s not just what you say. Words are cheap. It’s what you do. And voters need to see you doing it. Anat Shenker-Osorio had a long essay in Rolling Stone yesterday, not so much about messaging (her specialty) but about voter attitudes she sees in her focus groups: If my colleagues and I took a shot everytime someone in these groups decried the Democrats as doing nothing on the fascism front, we’d have cirrhosis. As one disaffected Democratic white woman from Arizona said in April, “I don’t think any of them care really.
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The only thing Trump gets in return is destruction of America’s alliances a nuclear arms race and possibly Europe. Win-win for both parties I guess: Former U.S. President Donald Trump on Saturday blasted the scale of U.S. support for Ukraine and said that if he is reelected in November he would immediately “have that settled.” At a campaign rally in Detroit, Trump criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, calling him “the greatest salesman of all time” for Kyiv’s push to secure U.S. support in its effort to defend Ukraine against Russian aggression more than three years after Moscow’s all-out invasion. “He just left four days ago with $60 billion, and he gets home, and he announces that he needs another $60 billion. It never ends,” Trump said. “I will have that settled prior to taking the White House as president-elect,” said Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee in the U.S. election. Trump said again the other day that he would also have secured the release of Evan Gerskovich as president-elect.
The Dems are playing Axios reports: The desperate scramble by Republicans to rationalize what he said tells the whole story. They know that Wisconsin is key. And they are freaking out about Trump insulting the state like this, especially since theb local news was all over it across the state: “He was talking about how terrible crime and voter fraud are,” said campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung. In another statement, the campaign wrote that it was a “total lie” that Trump called Milwaukee a “horrible city.” However, they went on to add, “President Trump was explicitly referring to the problems in Milwaukee, specifically violent crime and voter fraud,” suggesting he did make comments about the city, just not in the way some were interpreting it. The campaign then includes a series of tweets from Republican members from Wisconsin inside the room who agree with the campaign’s description that Trump was not making a blanket disparaging statement about the city.
I have mentioned this before but I want to put it out there again in case some of you missed it. This issue in The New Republic on what an American fascism would look like is a must read. It’s worth the subscription. Here’s an excerpt of editor Michael Tomasky’s intro which begins by noting that there is a lot of reluctance in our political discourse to draw this comparison as if it’s hysterical to acknowledge the threat: We have trouble seeing the hysteria. We chose the cover image, based on a well-known 1932 Hitler campaign poster, for a precise reason: that anyone transported back to 1932 Germany could very, very easily have explained away Herr Hitler’s excesses and been persuaded that his critics were going overboard. After all, he spent 1932 campaigning, negotiating, doing interviews—being a mostly normal politician. But he and his people vowed all along that they would use the tools of democracy to destroy it, and it was only after he was given power that Germany saw his movement’s full face. Today, we at The New Republic think we can spend this election year in one of two ways.
Move over, Guy Fawkes Post by @lobotany_ View on Threads ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.
“imagine if Biden did it” That wasn’t all. He did his weird schtick about shower heads too: At least he doesn’t have a stiff gait because that would be a deal breaker.
As Donald Trump made his first visit to the scene of the crime since the insurrection, the Biden campaign launched a new ad reminding people of that notorious event: You’d think of all people that members of the United States Congress would be reluctant to welcome the man who sicced a violent mob on them. But no, they greeted him with rapturous applause and even broke into a rousing rendition of “Happy Birthday” and brought out a cake. The House members were beside themselves. Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene gushed about how “funny” and “sweet” he is in real life and how it’s just so, like, awesome that he mentioned her by name and everything! She hasn’t been this excited since that time she had front row seats for the Back Street Boys back in ’98 and A.J. winked right at her (everybody said so.) She was far from alone. Even the Speaker of the House came before the cameras to say what a privilege it was to have Donald Trump tell him how great he is.
Fergawdsakes. I’m sure you’ve heard about the fears of the H5N1 avian flu virus being found in dairy cattle. Well, guess what? Ever vigilant about stoking fears among their constituents regarding the threat of governmental overreach, Republican leaders, as a form of political strategy, frequently crow about all the things liberals allegedly want to take away from working Americans. The White House is coming for their guns, they say, or perhaps their gas stoves — or even pints of raw milk that have potentially been contaminated with bird flu. […] “There is concern that consumption of unpasteurized milk and products made from unpasteurized milk contaminated with HPAI A(H5N1) virus could transmit HPAI A(H5N1) virus to people; however, the risk of human infection is unknown at this time,” the agency writes. However, in recent weeks, as the number of bird flu cases have climbed, so have sales of raw milk.
Baby elephants walk… Hilvarenbeek, NL, May 14, 2024 – Recently, three African elephants were born within four months: Mosi, Ajabu, and Tendai. The calves are doing very well, each weighing over 150 kilos. A few weeks ago, they also met their father Yambo for the first time. The calves and the rest of the herd immediately got along well. Vogels says, “The calves play together constantly and are very curious. They are also enthusiastically exploring this new habitat together.” The new Elephant Valley is one of the various enclosures housing the entire elephant herd of Beekse Bergen. In total, there are eleven African elephants in the Safari Park. Recently, Nile antelopes and Defassa waterbucks have also started using the valley. The three young elephants at Beekse Bergen have explored the Elephant Valley for the first time. This large habitat is entirely new to the calves; previously, they resided in an adjacent enclosure. In their new environment, there was a lot to discover, says head zookeeper Yvonne Vogels. “The herd behaved naturally, with the young ones staying nicely in the middle of the group and constantly staying together.
I saw this and assumed it must be a joke. It isn’t: Who knew? On Friday morning, Pope Francis was in fact full of praise for 105 entertainers from 15 countries who were invited to meet with him at a gathering that the Vatican described as an effort to “establish a link” between the humorists and the Roman Catholic Church. “In the midst of so much gloomy news,” Francis told them, “you denounce abuses of power, you give voice to forgotten situations, you highlight abuses, you point out inappropriate behavior.” He also lauded them for getting people to “think critically by making them laugh and smile.” Francis is a bit of a wisecracker himself. One of his standard punchlines, when people say they are praying for him, is to reply: “For or against?” — a line he riffed on during Friday’s gathering. He has also quipped that the best remedy for an ailing knee is tequila, and the comedian Ellen DeGeneres once made up a whole set built on one of Francis’ mother-in-law jokes.