While the Israel-Gaza horror carries on, Biden and Xi manage to thaw the frozen relationship with China a little bit This David Sanger piece is a nice succinct rundown of the summit this week Between Biden and Xi: When President Biden met President Xi Jinping on Wednesday on the edges of Silicon Valley, there was a subtle but noticeable shift in the power dynamic between two countries that have spent most of the past few years denouncing, undercutting and imposing sanctions on each other. For the first time in years, a Chinese leader desperately needed a few things from the United States. Mr. Xi’s list at the summit started with a revival of American financial investments in China and a break in the technology export controls that have, at least temporarily, crimped Beijing’s ability to make the most advanced semiconductors and the artificial intelligence breakthroughs they enable. All this may explain why Mr.
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Kevin Drum adds: There is, obviously, not much that can be done about the fact that Biden reads as old. But having now listened to a number of Biden’s recent speaking gigs, there’s really no question that this is solely about his physical appearance. Cognitively, Biden is perfectly normal. The worst he ever does is the occasional verbal flub, a longtime Biden habit. Agree with him or not, he says what he means to say and has obviously run the White House to his own specifications. He withdrew from Afghanistan despite internal qualms. He continued negotiating with Joe Manchin even though much of his staff hated the guy. He is staunchly pro-Israel in the face of a virtual staff revolt. He thinks Xi Jinping is a dictator and has repeated this through the grimaces of his Secretary of State. Contrast that with Donald Trump, who doesn’t read as old but can barely remember who the president is, who he’s run against in the past, and how many world wars we’ve had. We can either have the charade of an active president with a deteriorating mind behind it, or we can have an actual active president with a strong mind but physical limitations.
The soothing sounds of Steely Dan to ease your way into the weekend. You’re welcome. Steely Dan, guitarist Walter Becker and singer-pianist Donald Fagen are masters of irony and erudition. They grew up listening to Bill Evans, Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins, Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington. Since the late 1960s, they have been a musical Rubik’s Cube, continually honing their integration of jazz and rock. The pair performs Steely Dan hits “Josie” and “Chain Lightning” as well as standards “Mood Indigo” and “Hesitation Blues.” Originally recorded July 23, 2002. Originally aired in 2003.
The coach won’t give up. And he has a little MAGA minion helping him now. More GOPer on GOPer acrimony: Republican Senators Tommy Tuberville and Mike Lee maintained the Alabama Republican’s hold on military nominations despite a group of Republican senators who attempted to push through nominations when they returned to the Senate floor in the wee hours of Thursday morning. Sens. Dan Sullivan, Joni Ernst, Lindsay Graham and Todd Young began their effort to confirm nominees around 12:15a.m. ET and wrapped around 3:45a.m. ET. Tuberville was joined by Lee, who objected to confirming every nominee brought up for consideration. Once it became clear that Lee would speak at length every time he objected, the group of senators began reading the resumes of each of the nominees rather than attempting to confirm them one at a time. As he objected, Lee acknowledged that he understood his colleagues’ concerns about military readiness and politicizing the military and noted that he wouldn’t necessarily have chosen the same approach as Tuberville. However, he insisted that he needed to “defend” the Alabama Republican.
Tread carefully or go for it? Pick your metaphor. Whistling past a graveyard. Tiptoeing through a minefield. Every day feels like the country is doing a tightrope walk between the Twin Towers. And we know what happened to them. The question of Donald Trump’s qualification for any elected office is a hot potato neither the courts nor election officials nor Congress want to touch. Hayes Brown writes: Efforts to block former President Donald Trump from being on the ballot next year have yet to score a major win in court. Nobody in power seems willing to decide whether the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause disqualifies him from returning to the White House. Instead, judges and state officials have either pawned off that decision to someone else or determined that there will be some other, better time to make a judgment. The result is a rapidly shrinking window for that decision to be made. And, based on the standard in a ruling issued in Michigan on Tuesday, we might not know the answer until after all the votes have been cast on Election Day next year. It might be after the presidential electors have met and submitted their ballots.
It’s been a wild one. Does it matter? Dahlia Lithwick on the stakes: It’s been just a clutch of days since former President Donald Trump and his allies made clear that if he wins reelection, he plans to gut the existing U.S. government and “install a pre-vetted, pro-Trump army of up to 54,000 loyalists” to take over senior legal, judicial, defense, regulatory, and domestic policy jobs in the civil service.
What the physical violence in the US Congress portends Philip Bump takes a look at the possible meaning of GOP officials resorting to threats and physical violence this week on Capitol Hill. It is probably not terribly useful to draw sweeping conclusions from Sen. Markwayne Mullin’s demand Tuesday that a witness at a Senate hearing stand up and fight him. Mullin’s background is atypical for a senator, including a brief stint about 15 years ago during which he did mixed-martial arts fighting. The witness, meanwhile, was the head of the Teamsters union; his willingness to goad Mullin (R-Okla.) into the challenge was probably also atypical for someone appearing on Capitol Hill. We might also be cautious about the weird, probably overheated interaction between Reps. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), also on Tuesday, in which the latter accuses the former of elbowing him. Or the scuffle in January when the Republican Party was trying to elect McCarthy speaker in the first place. These were all isolated incidents, explainable in isolated contexts.
We are living in a deadly nightmare, right here in the USA This epic analysis of the horrific carnage caused by the AR-15 by the Washington Post is essential reading for every American with a conscience. It’s not easy. You may want to pour a drink or save some time to take a walk afterwards. But it’s important to bear witness. Mass shootings involving AR-15s have become a recurring American nightmare. The weapon, easy to operate and widely available, is now used more than any other in the country’s deadliest mass killings. Fired by the dozens or hundreds in rapid succession, bullets from AR-15s have blasted through classroom doors and walls. They have shredded theater seats and splintered wooden church pews. They have mangled human bodies and, in a matter of seconds, shattered the lives of people attending a concert, shopping on a Saturday afternoon, going out with friends and family, working in their offices and worshiping at church and synagogue. They have killed first-graders, teenagers, mothers, fathers and grandparents. But the full effects of the AR-15’s destructive force are rarely seen in public.
There is no debating what this is We can argue all day about whether supporting Palestinians or criticizing Israel is antisemitism but this is the real deal and can’t be denied. And it was disseminated by the man who owns one of the world’s most powerful social media platforms directly to his 160 million followers. Media Matter writes: The conspiracy theory, that Jewish populations are pushing “hatred against whites” and supporting “hordes of minorities” coming into the country, is the same one that motivated the 2018 Tree of Life shooter in Pittsburgh, as noted by The Atlantic’s Yair Rosenberg. Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and other figures linked to white nationalism are cheering on Musk.
We need it The world is exhausting right now and I’ve reached my bandwidth for the day. So here’s a little something less important that might bring a little happiness: Chinese President Xi Jinping signaled that China will send new pandas to the United States, calling them “envoys of friendship between the Chinese and American peoples.” “We are ready to continue our cooperation with the United States on panda conservation, and do our best to meet the wishes of the Californians so as to deepen the friendly ties between our two peoples,” Xi said Wednesday during a dinner speech with business leaders. The gesture came at the end of a day in which Xi and President Biden held their first face to face meeting in a year and pledged to try to reduce tensions. Xi did not share additional details on when or where pandas might be provided but appeared to suggest the next pair of pandas are most likely to come to California, probably San Diego. The bears have long been the symbol of the U.S.-China friendship since Beijing gifted a pair of pandas to the National Zoo in Washington in 1972, ahead of the normalization of bilateral relations.