New Reuters Ipsos poll: Worries about political extremism or threats to democracy have emerged as a top concern for U.S. voters and an issue where President Joe Biden has a slight advantage over Donald Trump ahead of the November election, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll showed. Overall, 34% of respondents said Biden had a better approach for handling extremism, compared to 31% who said Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination. Sometimes I feel like I’m going crazy. I get why 31% think Trump can better handle extremism — they want a tyrannical authoritarian to put his enemies in camps and he’s promising to do that. But why in the hell does only 34% back Biden on this issue since he’s what’s standing in the way of an extremist wannabe dictator becoming president again? They think he’s old so Trump would be better? What?
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Simon sums it up The press loves a horse race like the kid in the story assumes in a room full of manure there must be a pony. Naturally, the Washington Post reports “warning signs for Biden, Trump and Haley” in the Michigan primary results from Tuesday night. The race is on! And it’s a nail-biter! President Biden and former president Donald Trump won the Democratic and Republican primaries in Michigan by huge margins Tuesday night — but there were serious problems for both candidates lurking under the surface. Trump crushed Nikki Haley by over 40 points. Biden, meanwhile, won the Democratic primary by an even more overwhelming margin — but 13 percent of voters marked their ballots “uncommitted” following a campaign to persuade voters to not to support Biden in protest of his support for Israel and his refusal to call for a cease-fire in Gaza. The protesters want a cease-fire. They don’t want Biden to call for one. Biden and his team have been pressing Israel’s Bibi Netanyahu unsuccessfully for a cease-fire for weeks. The press wants to build suspense, though.
Of camels’ noses and tents We’ve warned plenty about the New Apostolic Reformation and the Seven Mountains people. Long before us, Richard Hofstadter warned about the paranoid style in American politics in 1964 in the wake of the McCarthy era. The paranoid style in American religion is closely related. In the late 1970s, Republican operatives decided on mobilizing useful idiots on the religious right for conservative political purposes. They invited the camel to poke its nose under the tent. And in the fullness of time we got QAnon and Trump and MAGA. ALL ONE, like the pepermint soap. Of camels’ noses and tents Axios reports this morning that while Christian nationalism is on the rise, it still remains widely unpopular: How fringe are Christian nationalists?
That ad is from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Campaign for Democracy. T The ad from Campaign for Democracy, which was shared first with NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” features a young woman handcuffed to a hospital bed, screaming for help while a narrator tells viewers, “Trump Republicans want to criminalize young women who travel to receive the reproductive care they need. Don’t let them hold Tennessee women hostage.” “These guys are not just restricting the rights, self-determination to bear a child for a young woman, but they’re also determining their fate as it relates to their future in life by saying they can’t even travel,” Newsom told “Meet the Press” on Saturday. Campaign for Democracy plans to run the ad in Tennessee because of two bills active in the state legislature — one in the state House and one in the state Senate — that would create the crime of “abortion trafficking,” or helping minors obtain abortions without parental consent.
If you liked East Germany ca. 1958, you’re going to love Texas in 2024 Spying on your neighbors, creating a paranoid society, was a prime method of control in the Soviet era. We used to think that was a bad idea: Texas Gov.
Yes, yes it is. So is this:
He’s got problems, personally and politically No wonder he’s acting crazy: If President Joe Biden has any advantage going into the 2024 presidential election, it’s that former President Donald Trump’s legal fees and primary challenges are a significant drain on the Trump campaign’s finances. Indeed, with money playing an increasingly prominent role in political campaigns, particularly presidential contests, both Trump and Biden are facing a very similar problem, albeit for different reasons, and to varying degrees.
Pay no attention to that foreign-born worker “You can’t grow like this with just the native workforce. It’s not possible,” says Pia Orrenius, vice president and senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. The Washington Post’s online front page this morning blares that immigration is fueling the “roaring” U.S. economy. And you thought there was a border crisis, a crisis hyped by Republicans who believe it can wait for the November election. “About 50 percent of the labor market’s extraordinary recent growth came from foreign-born workers between January 2023 and January 2024, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis of federal data,” The Post reports. By the middle of 2022, rapid growth in the foreign-born labor force “closed the labor force gap created by the pandemic“: Immigrant workers also recovered much faster than native-born workers from the pandemic’s disruptions, and many saw some of the largest wage gains in industries eager to hire.
The autocratic shift is not irreversible “Wisconsin may be stepping back from the abyss,” writes Bill Leuders at The Bulwark. New maps passed by the Republican-controlled legislature and signed by Wisconsin’s Democratic governor, Tony Evers, mean Wisconsin’s legislative races will be the most competititve in years. Republicans previously engineered years’ worth of lopsided representation in a state in which Democrats like Evers can win statewide races. Now, “more than forty incumbent lawmakers, mostly Republicans, [have] to either move or run against each other.” The change is not because Republicans have had a change of heart. So why did Republicans who rejected Evers’ appointments and refused funding for the University of Wisconsin’s diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts go along now? Because Democrats wrested back control of the state Supreme Court last April when voters statewide “overwhelmingly elected liberal Janet Protasiewicz” to the court: They feared that the state supreme court’s new liberal majority would choose maps that were even less friendly to their side.
I’ve actually wondered why they haven’t done this bit before. It’s been sitting there waiting for them for years. This was very timely, though. They even had the S. Carolina vote count in the sketch. But they missed Graham being booed and heckled at Trump’s victory party after which Trump called him up on stage to bask in the recriminations and hate. There is no limit to how much abuse these weirdos are willing to take. Here’s Graham being chased through the airport after he tepidly condemned the January 6th insurrection. He’d rather grovel before these assholes than give up his seat in the Senate. It’s pathetic.