Or will they help the GOP cut its losses and move on? Donald Trump came to America’s attention as a political actor back in 2011 when he became the self-appointed leading voice on the right insisting that President Barack Obama had been illegally elected president because he supposedly wasn’t born in the US. He made all the rounds of the news shows demanding that Obama produce his birth certificate even claiming that he sent people to Hawaii, Obama’s birthplace, telling the Today show audience “they cannot believe what they’re finding.” When Obama produced the birth certificate Trump claimed “an extremely reliable source” told him it was a forgery. This went on for years until Trump was elected president in 2016. And it was all a lie. Isn’t it so typically Trump that after all that it would be him who turned out to be disqualified from the presidential ballot? At least that’s what the Colorado Supreme Court ruled last night in a case that cites the 4th Amendment barring officers of the government from running if they’ve participated in an insurrection.
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The cult has been going mad over this: Donald Trump keeps sharing a photo on social media featuring a bright-red arrow pointing at the head of a bearded man at his civil fraud trial — claiming he is the son of the judge. The Post can now confirm that the pictured bespectacled, well-groomed target is not the kin of Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron. I should know — I’m the guy in the photo. Trump, 77, on Tuesday yet again signal-boosted the photo of me sitting a few rows into the court gallery along with an article by a fringe-right activist inexplicably claiming Engoron’s son is “financially benefitting” from being given a “prominent” seat at the trial. The post went out to Trump’s 6.52 million followers on the Truth Social app. It was the second time within a month that the former president shared the photo of me and a screenshot of the Nov. 7 article from Laura Loomer, an anti-Muslim activist who once described Islam as a “cancer” and has been banned from social media sites in the past.
Are you sure? It seems like this new year can’t get any more turbulent or our political system more volatile. We’re going to have Donald Trump on trial, epic Supreme Court decisions, foreign policy crises and, oh yeah, the most important election of our lives. I’m already reeling with it and I’m sure you are too. We are living through very, very consequential times. Obviously, the end of the cold war shook everything up after 40 years of a stand-off and the modern conservative movement’s long-term project finally flowering changed our politics. But things have been hurtling at warp speed over the past two decades with an epic terrorist attack that sent the nation into a frenzy and enabled a tragic war from which we still have not fully recovered. The financial crisis of 2008 was the worst economic catastrophe the vast majority of us have ever experienced. (Only the very oldest Americans went through the Great Depression.) The technological revolution of the last few decades is changing our lives so quickly that we can’t keep up from day to day.
This should have been interrogated a little bit more. These people disapprove of Biden’s Israel policy but think his support for Israel and Palestine is about right? I guess they might not think he shouldn’t support of either of them at all but that seems like a stretch. It’s weird question but it should be this confusing. I think this shows the limitations of polling right now. People are expressing their discontent with Joe Biden on the economy despite telling pollsters their own financial situation is improved and they’re saying they disapprove of his handling of Israel despite the fact that they think he’s gotten the balance between the two warring parties about right. They’re basically saying they disapprove of Joe Biden and it actually has nothing to do with his policies. In fact, they like his policies. They’ve just decided they don’t like him. I have to assume that some of this (at least among swing voters and Democrats) is about the PTSD dynamic that lingers from the pandemic and also the chaos that Trump and the Republicans constantly cause and which people think Biden is impotent to stop.
I’m sure this is terrible news for Joe Biden: The best answer to most of this is “not sure” unless you are a highly educated constitutional scholar or Supreme Court expert. But we all have our uneducated opinions. I’m going with “will reverse” myself. But it’s nice to see that some of the Republicans agree that he committed an insurrection and should be barred though. If they stick with that then Trump will lose. Happy Hollandaise!
JV Last has a great piece up today about the Colorado decision that you should read in its entirety. I’ll just excerpt this one part: Have you ever noticed how, whenever Trump does something terrible, there is always an argument that holding him accountable can only help him? You can’t impeach him in 2020, because it’ll just make him stronger. You can’t impeach him in 2021, because you’ll turn him into a martyr. You can’t raid Mar-a-Lago to take back classified documents, because you’ll rile up his base. You can’t prosecute him for crimes X, Y, and Z, because it’ll make Republican voters love him more. There is a strange, self-limiting, helplessness to that thinking: A wicked man does immoral and illegal things—and society’s reaction is to say that we must indulge his depredations, because if we tried to hold him accountable then he would become even worse. Is there any other aspect of life in which Americans take that view? That’s not how parents deal with children. It’s not how regulatory agencies deal with corporations. And it’s not how the justice system deals with criminals.
The coming war may not be civil A “yankee” in a meeting yesterday said she’d moved to North Carolina from New England because she felt her political activism would make more of a difference here. She may be right. This really is going to be a battleground in 2024. This Morning Digest edition from Daily Kos makes that case: NC Supreme Court: Candidate filing closed this past Friday for the March 5 primaries in North Carolina, a perennial swing state that will host closely watched races up and down the ballot. Not to be overlooked, though, is a crucial contest for an eight-year term on the state Supreme Court. Gov. Roy Cooper appointed Allison Riggs in September after Mike Morgan, a fellow Democrat, resigned ahead of launching a bid for governor. Had Morgan instead sought and won another term on the court, he would have faced mandatory retirement at the age of 72, in 2027, less than halfway through a second term. The new justice, whose appointment at 42 made her the youngest woman ever to serve on the court, won’t face that same problem, but she doesn’t have a clear path to the general election.
When we complain about the media, this is why What’s wrong with this picture? In most situations, comparing a political opponent to Adolf Hitler might seem like an extraordinary step. For Joe Biden’s campaign, it has become part of the routine of running against Donald Trump. When the former president said that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country” during a New Hampshire rally on Saturday, a Biden campaign aide charged with monitoring Trump immediately circulated the comments to staffers, according to senior officials. Within hours, the campaign released a statement attacking Trump for having “channeled his role models as he parroted Adolf Hitler, praised Kim Jong Un, and quoted Vladimir Putin while running for president on a promise to rule as a dictator and threaten American democracy.” In fairness, the article goes on to explain, correctly, that Trump is evoking Hitler in his speeches. The Biden campaign even sent the article around.
We will immediately stop all of the pillaging and theft. Very simply: If you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store. He said that a couple of months ago in the wake of a full summer of panic over an alleged wave of violent shoplifting all over the country. The LA Times’ Michael Hilzik takes a look at this issue in light of the fact that the National Retail Federation’s report that “organized shoplifting” was sweeping the nation is now revealed to have been a total lie: The statistic, published in April by the National Retail Federation, was that “organized retail crime” — including the videotaped flash mob smash-and-grab events aired in frequent rotation on the cable and evening news shows — came to more than $45 billion a year. Specifically, the NRF declared that organized crime accounted for “nearly half” of the $94.5 billion in retail “shrink” attributed to theft or “other causes” in 2021. The claim appeared in the latest edition of the federation’s annual report on organized retail crime. On Dec.
It’s going to be a long year, people. It’s clear that it’s going to require a lot of fortitude to avoid falling into despair over the next few months if they continue to cover this election as they have been. What I see happening is that while they are appropriately covering Trump’s ascent into full Hitlerian fascism (for now, anyway) they are also succumbing to their usual need to “balance” the coverage by hyping Biden’s unpopularity. I’m not suggesting that he’s popular. He isn’t. But just look at the NY Times coverage of their polling. I’m sure you remember this one from last month: Ok. Here’s their latest poll which shows that Biden is leading Trump nationally among likely voters: Here’s the website: I’m not kidding when I say he’s leading nationally which ought to account for a mention in at least one headline fergawdsakes! Here’s how they address it way down in the main article: Overall, registered voters say they favor Mr. Trump over Mr. Biden in next year’s presidential election by two percentage points, 46 percent to 44 percent.