Are you better off? Yes you are better off. That was a historic horror show. How about 5 years ago when the economy under Trump was supposedly the greatest the world has ever known: Yep. So how are people feeling right now? Paul Krugman: So Quinnipiac is doing swing-state polls that among other things ask people both about the state of the economy and their personal finances. Here’s Michigan, but you see the same disconnect elsewhere I keep seeing claims that never mind the macro data, people’s lived experience is of a bad economy. But consumer sentiment isn’t a lived experience; it’s a narrative, and one that is actually at odds with people’s personal lives Why?
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Michael Tomasky runs down all the roadblocks, delays, ratfucks and manipulations being used by the Trump team (which is a D-List team at best, which says something) to ensure that Trump does not go to trial on any of his criminal cases before the election. It’s depressing, but it’s true and you should read the whole thing if you haven’t seen it all put together. His conclusion is absolutely correct: When we talk about what’s wrong with our democracy, we talk about our political structures and processes. We talk about the Senate. We talk about the Electoral College. We talk about gerrymandering. And of course all these problems are real. We don’t talk about our legal system. We should. The American legal system doesn’t uphold the values of democratic rule like equality. It far more often corrupts and perverts them. Rich people like Trump twist the system into a pretzel and win delay after delay after delay. Corporations pay fines, usually not that large when considered against their bottom line, and they admit no wrongdoing, even after their practices have killed people. Poor people, meanwhile, get pushed around by the system constantly.
Jamelle Bouie on Kellyanne Conway’s lame attempt to paper over the GOP’s problem on reproductive rights: Republican strategists are well aware that abortion is an albatross around the party’s neck. Their advice? Find new language. “If it took 50 years to overturn Roe v. Wade, it’s going to take more than 50 minutes, 50 hours or 50 weeks to explain to people what that means, and more importantly, what it doesn’t mean, and to move hearts and minds,” said Kellyanne Conway, a former adviser to Donald Trump, at Politico’s Health Care Summit on Wednesday. During the conversation, she advised Republican candidates to focus on “concession” and “consensus” and to turn the conversation toward exceptions. She also urged Republicans to avoid ballot initiatives on abortion, for fear that they could mobilize voters against them. I have no doubt that Republicans will take this advice; they are desperate to neutralize the issue. But the Republican abortion problem isn’t an issue of language, it’s an issue of material reality.
Please pass this on to any jackass who claims that Trump did a good job with the pandemic. Aside from the inability to even get masks and gowns to NY City in the early days and his insistence that people take snake oil or inject disinfectant, there was his desire to stop testing people because it made him look bad that we had so many case. It is one of the most important low points no one should be allowed to forget it. Ever.
WTF is happening here? These are troubled times in Arizona. Until 2020, election officials were the largely anonymous folk who did the important yet unseen work of making democracy run smoothly. “Nobody knew who we were, what we did,” Fontes said ruefully. “It’s a little bit different now.” All changed with Donald Trump’s unprecedented refusal to accept defeat in the 2020 election. His conspiracy to subvert the election has had an explosive impact in Arizona, a battleground state which has become arguably the ground zero of election denial in America. In 2020, the Republican-controlled state legislature sponsored a widely discredited “audit” of votes in Maricopa county, the largest constituency containing Phoenix. Republican leaders put themselves forward as fake electors in a possibly criminal attempt to flip Joe Biden’s victory in Arizona to Trump’s. Two years later, in the midterms, armed vigilantes dressed in tactical gear stalked drop boxes in a vain hunt for “mules” stuffing fraudulent ballots into them.
One of the first things people ask you when you say you’re writing a book for O’Reilly Media is: “What animal is going to be on the cover?” O’Reilly books are famous for their lovely animal drawings, in rich detail, either in black-or-white or colour. Books are sometimes referred to by their cover animal, like … Continue reading Cover Animal For ActivityPub Book
Fight back. We did it before. “There exists no more sordid and unlovely type of social development than a plutocracy,” Teddy Roosevelt insisted in Provincetown, Massachusetts in 1907. Roosevelt saw the harms of the first Gilded Age and sought, with public support, to end them: The utterly changed conditions of our national life necessitate changes in certain of our laws, of our governmental methods…. National sovereignty is to be upheld in so far as it means the sovereignty of the people used for the real and ultimate good of the people; and state’s rights are to be upheld in so far as they mean the people’s rights. Especially is this true in dealing with the relations of the people as a whole to the great corporations which are the distinguishing feature of modern business conditions. One hunded plus years later, we are in a second Gilded Age. Or haven’t you noticed? Robert Reich has: Billions in campaign contributions. Jim Crow 2.0.Workers exploited.Child labor has returned.Staggering inequality. Oh, and facsism. We beat back the first five at the beginning of the 20th century. Reich believes we can do it again.
From the state that brought you Jesse Helms Al Jolson telling the audience, “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet,” in 1927’s The Jazz Singer marked the end of the silent film era. Well, buckle up. The North Carolina that brought you Jesse Helms, the state that elected Christian nationalist Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson and made him the 2024 Republican nominee for governor, isn’t done yet. The state’s Republican primary voters upset their own incumbent superintendent of public instruction, Catherine Truitt, on March 5 and replaced her on the ballot with Michele Morrow. “Every sign we had said that Catherine Truitt was going to win this election,” political scientist Dr. Chris Cooper told reporters. Jake Tapper and Andy Kaczynski introduced CNN viewers to Morrow Thursday night (via WRAL): Michele Morrow, a conservative activist who last week upset the incumbent Superintendent of Public Instruction in North Carolina’s Republican primary, expressed support in 2020 for the televised execution of former President Barack Obama and suggested killing then-President-elect Joe Biden. “Wait a minute, I tell ya,” Jolson said.
One of Donald Trump’s most famous quotes is from the 2016 campaign when he said,” I could shoot someone on 5th avenue and not lose any voters.” He seems to have convinced himself that it’s true. Despite the fact that he has been losing between 20 and 40 percent in most of the Republican primaries this year, he insists that they will all vote for him in the fall and anyway, he says, “I’m not sure we need too many.” As recently as Super Tuesday he told Right Side Broadcasting, “I don’t need votes, we have all the votes we need.” And why wouldn’t he say that? After all, as he told Newsmax again on Thursday night, “We won in 2016, we won even bigger in 2020 , we won by a lot more” so he’s certain to get as many votes this time. Or, at least, that seems to be his logic. But if he was really so sure of himself you’d think he wouldn’t need to ensure that the election is going to be a nightmare that makes 2020 look placid and serene by comparison, wouldn’t you? But that looks like what he has in mind.
So many people have tuned out of politics over the past three years because of the trauma of the Trump years, the pandemic and simple exhaustion and relief. As a result they are uninformed. Will Bunch writes: The biggest reason for the missing alarm about the prospect of Trump 47 might simply be a lack of information. The New Republic’s Greg Sargent recently reported on a poll of 1,200 voters deemed gettable for Biden in three swing states, including Pennsylvania, and found the vast majority didn’t know about Trump’s “dictator for a day” comments, or that he’d echoed Adolf Hitler in calling enemies “vermin” and claiming migrants are “poisoning the blood” of America. The pollster said only 31% of persuadable voters had heard much about these statements. You can call it voter apathy, but a lot of the blame belongs to a mainstream media that’s not banging the pots and pans like it should be and remains much more obsessed about the horse race odds of who wins the election than the stakes of an undemocratic presidency. Sargent says this presents an opportunity: That’s maddening for obvious reasons.