With “friends” like these … This story about the head of the Florida GOP and his wife, the founder of LGBTQ-hating Moms for Liberty, is stunning: The head of Florida’s Republican Party indicated Saturday he will not step down while facing an investigation into sexual assault, rejecting calls by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to give up his role as the party’s top operative. In a letter to the state GOP, chairman Christian Ziegler did not address the allegation – which continued to send shockwaves through the state on Saturday as troubling new details about the investigation emerged – but suggested a conspiracy was afoot to leak details from the Sarasota Police Department probe. “We have a country to save and I am not going to let false allegations of a crime put that mission on the bench as I wait for this process to wrap up,” he wrote.
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I’m sure he’ll be right back in the Senate GOP fold now. No biggie. He’s still on their team. FFS: Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama, announced on Tuesday that he would lift his blockade of nearly all the military promotions he had delayed for almost a year in protest of a Pentagon policy ensuring abortion access for service members, continuing to hold up only the most senior generals. Mr. Tuberville said he had lifted his holds on about 440 military promotions. “Everybody but the 10 or 11 four-stars,” he said. “Those will continue.” The announcement represented a stark reversal from Mr. Tuberville, who for 10 months had steadfastly defended his move to stall senior military promotions over a new Pentagon policy that offers time off and travel reimbursement to service members seeking abortions or fertility care. His blockade had single-handedly disrupted the Pentagon’s ability to fill its top ranks, leaving hundreds of promotions in limbo.
It’s way more likely than we think David Frum is one Never Trumper from whom I still recoil even though I’m a big believer in a popular front against Trump. He’s still a wingnut in some very important ways. Nonetheless, this big Atlantic issue about what will happen if Trump wins has a number of good articles and I thought his was was especially thought provoking: A second Trump term would instantly plunge the country into a constitutional crisis more terrible than anything seen since the Civil War. Even in the turmoil of the 1960s, even during the Great Depression, the country had a functional government with the president as its head. But the government cannot function with an indicted or convicted criminal as its head. The president would be an outlaw, or on his way to becoming an outlaw. For his own survival, he would have to destroy the rule of law. From Trump himself and the people around him, we have a fair idea of a second Trump administration’s immediate priorities: (1) Stop all federal and state cases against Trump, criminal and civil. (2) Pardon and protect those who tried to overturn the 2020 election on Trump’s behalf.
I could hardly believe I heard him right and had to listen to it twice. Not much is shocking these days but this is. The Speaker of the House is protecting the insurrectionists from the FBI. And he’s admitting it as if it is perfectly normal. This is so far beyond normal we’re living in another dimension now. We are broken.
Krugman is on the case Let’s deal in reality for a moment shall we? Over the past six months, the personal consumption expenditure deflator excluding food and energy — I know that’s a mouthful, but it’s the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of underlying inflation — has risen at an annual rate of only 2.5 percent, down from 5.7 percent in March 2022. The Fed’s inflation target is 2 percent, so we’re not quite there yet. And you shouldn’t expect the Fed to declare victory any time soon. As I can tell you from personal experience, anyone suggesting that inflation is more or less under control can expect an avalanche of hate mail and hostile commentary on social media. In fact, I believe that the vehemence with which some Americans insist that inflation is still running wild distorts coverage in conventional media, too, because journalists are deterred from saying anything positive. And the Fed has to be especially careful, because it would lose credibility if inflation went back up after sounding too optimistic. The truth, however, is that inflation is looking very much like yesterday’s problem.
Though I have been interested in ecological economics ever since I read The Limits to Growth (Meadows, Randers, and Meadows 1972), E.F. Schumacher (Schumacher 1973, 1979) and Hermann Daly (Daly 1974) in the early 1970s, and I have been a critic of Neoclassical economics for just as long, I didn’t start critiquing the Neoclassical approach … Continue reading "Capitalism, with friends like these, you don’t need enemies"
Apparently, the Washington Post has decided it needs to “move to the center” and I’m sure you know what that means. It’s pretty devastating for them to do this at this particular moment. If we ever needed clear-headed analysis it’s now and if there’s one thing we know, “centrism” (aka “both sides”) is never clear headed. They’ve been laying good people off and one of them is Paul Waldman, one of the best analysts they had. The good news is that he has a newsletter so his insights will still be accessible. (Thank god for blogging, eh?) Here’s one he posted today and I could not agree with it more. Any regular consumer of political news has been deluged with stories recently about traditionally Democratic voting groups who may be ready to defect from Joe Biden in 2024, especially Muslim Americans and young people. It’s mostly about recent events in Israel and Gaza, but the grievances driving this debate have included housing costs, student debt, and climate change.
What a motley crew The Atlantic has published a big series on “if Trump wins” and it’s full of interesting stuff, much of which I’ll discuss here over the next few days. l’ll start out with this one from McKay Coppins, on who Trump plans to put into his top spots. It won’t be like last time when he surrounded himself with people he thought came “right out of Central Casting.” Don’t expect it to happen again. The available supply of serious, qualified people willing to serve in a Trump administration has dwindled since 2017. After all, the so-called adults didn’t fare so well in their respective rooms. Some quit in frustration or disgrace; others were publicly fired by the president. Several have spent their post–White House lives fielding congressional subpoenas and getting indicted. And after seeing one Trump term up close, vanishingly few of them are interested in a sequel: This past summer, NBC News reported that just four of Trump’s 44 Cabinet secretaries had endorsed his current bid. Even if mainstream Republicans did want to work for him again, Trump is unlikely to want them.
Via: On Friday — after 57 days — “UN Women” finally got around to condemning Hamas’s use of rape as a weapon of terror against Israeli women. Noted the Jerusalem Post: The statement came only after a bipartisan group of lawmakers urged the UN to condemn Hamas’s October 7 attack. The UN’s long silence has, unfortunately, been mirrored by many of the groups who had been the most vocal about sexual assault and abuse in other contexts. Over at Slate, a group of progressive writers — including Dahlia Lithwick, Mimi Rocah, Jennifer Taub, Tamar Zepper, Joyce Vance, and Julie Zebrak called out their fellow feminists: Gaby Hinsliff made a similar point in the Guardian: “Whatever your view of the Israel-Hamas war, rape is rape. To trivialise it is to diminish ourselves.” Over the weekend, CNN’s Dana Bash had a tense confrontation with Progressive Caucus chair Pramila Jayapal on the question of Hamas’s sexual violence.
If you are a person who understands the trauma that October 7th caused to Israelis and Jews around the world, you should see the reality here. The ongoing carnage in Gaza cannot be defended and Israel is very close to losing the support of the rest of the world that currently supports it: US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Israel risked “strategic defeat” in its war with Hamas if it fails to heed warnings about the mounting civilian death toll. “I have personally pushed Israeli leaders to avoid civilian casualties, and to shun irresponsible rhetoric, and to prevent violence by settlers in the West Bank,” Austin said in a speech to the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California, on Saturday. Austin’s comments come as top US officials have grown increasingly vocal in their warnings to Israel about the death toll in the Gaza Strip. Those warnings, previously confined to closed-door meetings, have been thrust into the open by mounting pressure from Israel’s Arab neighbors, human-rights activists and opinion at home — including the left of President Joe Biden’s Democratic Party.