Bye Mitch: I don’t think anyone who reads this blog needs me to recite chapter and verse of what this man has done to America with his “ends justify the means” tactics. We all know what he’s done. But even he isn’t hardcore enough for the MAGAs. He says that he knows the politics of his party and he knows that they have become so extreme that they will no longer tolerate him. He’s lost control of them. God help us if Trump wins another term and gets a congressional majority.
Uncategorized
Trump really did say his rambling is “total genius” and “if I were cognitively impaired, I think I’d know about it.” How about this? He has been addled for years. But whether it’s encroaching dementia of some kind or just his panic and distraction over the legal and financial problems he’s facing, he’s getting worse. I know I don’t have to point out what would happen if Joe Biden said anything like that.
Also, this happened: We can’t let these people take power. We just can’t.
They insisted that an embryo’s stem cells represented a human with full human rights. Of course IVF is on the chopping block This was the reason that those “fetal personhood”laws were all passed originally — to placate the extremists who would rather see actual people suffering and dying than allow embryos or fetal tissue to be used for life-saving research. Every time a Republican has been in the white house it’s been a huge controversy. IVF wasn’t discussed much on the right and when it was they turned to the far right Evangelicals who call the embryos “snowflake babies” and insist they should be adopted and implanted. (Considering how many of them there are it would obviously take a “Handmaids Tale” level of forced pregnancies to make that happen.) Now that they got Roe overturned, the chickens have come home to roost. Here’s Greg Sargent on the GOP’s dilemma on the IVF issue: When Donald Trump attacked the recent Alabama Supreme Court ruling that frozen embryos should be considered children, it was widely seen as a glaring indicator of a new political reality.
Even as the vast majority of Americans reject it Axios reports on the latest PRRI poll on Christian Nationalism. Surprise! Most Americans aren’t for it: This once-fringe ideology has become prevalent in some deeply red states at a time when the nation overall is increasingly diverse and less religious. The new data from the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute’s American Values Atlas come days after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos should receive legal protections as “unborn life” — and cited Christianity in its reasoning. 7 out of 10 Americans said they were rejecters (30%) or skeptics (37%) of Christian nationalism, the PRRI survey said. In California, New York and Virginia, more than 75% of respondents said they were rejecters or skeptics. In five deeply red states, at least 45% of respondents said they were adherents or sympathizers of Christian nationalism: North Dakota (50%), Mississippi (50%), Alabama (47%), West Virginia (47%) and Louisiana (46%).
They decided to take the immunity case so they’ll hear oral arguments two months from now despite what everyone believes is a bulletproof appellate decision. They didn’t need to hear it and if they did, they sure as hell could have made that decision weeks ago. It’s pretty clear they’re going to slow walk this thing so there’s little chance of a trial before the election. Former Judge Michael Luttig happened to be on MSNBC when this came down and he said that the fact that they’ve decided to hear this case indicates that there are dissents from the appellate decision. (Gee, I wonder who that could be?) As a result, there is every likelihood that if their ultimate decision is that a president can’t be a blatant criminal with total immunity, there will be dissents and they will take their sweet time. Recall, it didn’t used to be that way: It was on [July 24] in 1974 that the U.S. Supreme Court dealt a fatal blow to President Richard Nixon’s presidency, in a decision that led to the release of the Watergate tapes. The case of United States v.
Catherine Rampell tweeted this short thread that I think expresses the fundamental political message that the Democrats have to hammer home: political FREEDOM. The more significant political fallout of this IVF discourse may not be revelation that GOP is often anti-family (surprise!), but rather the undermining of narrative that Dems are merely “pro-abortion” (rather than pro-reproductive freedom) Subtext (or text) of Repub attacks on Dem abortion positions is that they’re driven by childless elites who want to kill babies. IVF debate suggests Ds are promoting not abortion, but freedom—specifically, reproductive freedom, to choose when to begin or expand your family If Dems are smart, this is the angle they’ll play up — perhaps taking a page from @SecretaryPete’s 2020 campaign, about how Dems should reclaim “freedom” as a rhetorical device. His message should be even more compelling today, as one party considers putting an authoritarian in office. 2024’s political “freedom” fight isn’t about mask mandates.
Salon caught Trump’s latest late night freakout. He seems upset: Donald Trump began his Monday raging about the slew of civil and criminal trials mounting against him, bemoaning specifically local trials like the New York criminal case set to start at the end of March. The former president recently attended a hearing in that case, which was brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and charges him with 34 felony counts related to alleged hush-money payments he made to an adult film actress in 2016. The presiding judge denied Trump’s request to dismiss the case and set a March 25 trial date. Despite a triumphant Saturday following his win in South Carolina’s GOP primary, Trump’s slate of legal troubles seemed to take center stage for him Sunday. Just before midnight, he took to Truth Social to praise a Fox News show he was viewing about his New York state fraud case, in which he was ordered to pay $355 million in penalties — now $454 million with interest, and encouraged his followers to watch the rerun at 3 a.m. Eastern time. “Wow!
Oh my… From Joe Perticone at The Bulwark: During an appearance yesterday on the Talking Feds podcast, former North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, a Democrat, caused a bit of a stir when she floated a rumor that Rep. Matt Rosendale may have a three-alarm scandal on his hands. Immediately after I heard these words, I reached out to Rosendale’s spokesman Ron Kovach, who replied in an email, “This is 100% false and defamatory and former Senator Heitkamp will be hearing from our lawyers soon.” Heitkamp didn’t outright claim that Rosendale is guilty of what she alleged she heard: She mentioned only that the story has been going around. That is a big difference as far as lawyers are concerned, if they do end up getting involved. But Rosendale suddenly leaving Congress would throw the House into an even greater state of chaos, hard as that might be to imagine. Losing another member of the House Republican Conference would leave the GOP majority so thin that if you held it up you’d be able to see the sun shining through it.
Last night as I was scrolling through Xitter I came across a dozen or so posts excoriating Joe Biden for discussing a possible Gaza ceasefire while he was eating ice cream. He was asked about by a reporter and he answered it. And it was possibly good news too. (He said he was optimistic that there would be a ceasefire by the end of the coming weekend.) But he was bad for doing it while he had an ice cream cone in his hand which I guess means he should not have been eating any ice cream when there is a crisis in Gaza or he should have told the reporter to fuck off, in which case he would have been accused of avoiding the subject. This criticism came from both left and right, which was bizarre. As for the right wingers — whatever. They have to reach for anything they can and this was on the level of “Obama wore a tan suit at the podium” level sophistry from them. From the left, it’s a little bit more serious. I understand that people are very agitated about this war, and they are right to be so. They’re trying to influence Joe Biden to do something to stop the massacre of innocent civilians in Gaza and are using whatever means they have.