Trump’s minions are busily drawing up plans to prosecute enemies and deploy the military into the streets of America Over the weekend, Democrats celebrated their biennial tradition of hand-wringing and panic about the election a year hence. Every cycle about this time, polls showing that their voters are unhappy with their candidates and wish they had someone better are floated by all the major polling outfits and everyone starts hyperventilating. It seems like only yesterday that the polling showed Democrats being swept away by a “red tsunami” in the midterms and it was inevitable that they would lose both chambers of Congress for the foreseeable future. Oops! One of the more extreme examples of this came back in 2011 when President Barack Obama was running for re-election. With a 61% disapproval rating on the economy and 73% saying the country was heading in the wrong direction in some polls, there was growing talk of running a primary opponent or replacing Joe Biden as vice president on the ticket.
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Whomever made this, bravo! pic.twitter.com/75H43v32RT — Majestic (@MajesticResists) November 5, 2023 How do they explain this?
Look to the Double Haters Dan Pfeiffer does some useful analysis about the NY Times poll and the “double haters” in his newsletter: I am still processing this poll and will have more to say in the coming days. But I do not want to sugarcoat it. While some of Trump’s gains among Black, Hispanic, and young voters may be hard to believe, numbers like these are broadly consistent with the trendlines in recent polls. This poll shows that not only can Trump win, he might now be a slight favorite to do so. Even if we don’t take the results literally, we should take them very, very seriously. Instead of doom-scrolling and tweeting through our panic, we should see this poll as a roadmap on how to reconstitute the anti-MAGA majority. We have to persuade the voters we have lost since 2020. Here’s one place to start. Who are the “Double Haters” Every election cycle, the political press likes to identify a specific group of voters as the ones to decide the election.
and the royalist style in American politics The reason people chose an authoritarian for president in 2016 was not economic anxiety, although that was there. And it was not racism, although that was there too. Robert P. Jones, founder and president of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) spoke with Chauncey DeVega about the apocalypticism behind White Christian nationalism and the desire to restore “traditional American values.” With violence, if need be. Jones discusses his findings in “The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future.” Results of a recent American Values Survey reveal, says Jones (Salon): Three-quarters of Americans believe that the future of democracy is at stake in the 2024 presidential election. It’s one of the few things that Republicans and Democrats agree on, 84% of Democrats and 77% of Republicans. Now, of course, they mean very different things in terms of their concerns about “democracy.” There is also great pessimism about the country.
He and his teenage son check each other’s porn habits Not a joke: SPEAKER OF THE House Mike Johnson admitted that he and his son monitored each other’s porn intake in a resurfaced clip from 2022. During a conversation on the “War on Technology” at Benton, Louisiana’s Cypress Baptist Church — unearthed by X user Receipt Maven last week — the Louisiana representative talked about how he installed “accountability software” called Covenant Eyes on his devices in order to abstain from internet porn and other unsavory websites. “It scans all the activity on your phone, or your devices, your laptop, what have you; we do all of it,” Johnson told the panel about the app. “It sends a report to your accountability partner. My accountability partner right now is Jack, my son. He’s 17. So he and I get a report about all the things that are on our phones, all of our devices, once a week. If anything objectionable comes up, your accountability partner gets an immediate notice.
Imagine what would happen if Trump testified in a criminal case. pic.twitter.com/nDhZM6O98N — Bill Grueskin (@BGrueskin) November 6, 2023 Cue the reporting about how Trump, a 77 year old conspiracist who is delusional about basic aspects of reality, is too cognitively impaired to be president. Right? Right? pic.twitter.com/3Gdp2tgOBc — Brian Klaas (@brianklaas) November 6, 2023 Here’s a minute by minute of the morning session. Jesus H. Christ. Tens of millions of people want to put this psycho back in the White House: “All rise.” Court is now in session. Justice Engoron alludes to the photographers, who are about to come in to photograph Trump and counsel at the defense table. Note: This will be the second time that Trump takes the stand in this trial. The first time, Justice Engoron found him “not credible” — and in violation of his gag order. Engoron remarked that they’re often referred to as a “gaggle” of photojournalist, a word usually used to describe “geese,” he notes. NYAG’s counsel Kevin Wallace: “The People call Donald J.
Israelis want Bibi gone: Angry protesters paid Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a home visit over the weekend, chanting, “jail now!” They were echoing rising cries from across the country for the veteran Israeli leader to step down. A new poll by an Israeli news station found that 76% of respondents want Netanyahu to resign. Many blame him for the security failures behind Hamas’ Oct. 7 terror rampage across southern Israel. “He must resign!” shouted Moshe Radman outside Netanyahu’s home over the weekend. Radman is one of the Israelis who’s been leading the protests against the country’s leader. Asked by CBS News what motivated him, he said it was Netanyahu “lying again and again and again.” “A leader needs to think 100% about our soldiers and our country and 0% about himself,” he said.
The perennial question The Faye Dunaway character in “Network” explained Howard Beale’s popularity: “The American people are turning sullen. They’ve been clobbered on all sides by Vietnam, Watergate, the inflation, the depression; they’ve turned off, shot up, and they’ve fucked themselves limp, and nothing helps. The American people want somebody to articulate their rage for them.” Is Trump just Howard Beale? It’s as good an explanation as anything, I guess. But remember, Howard Beale was certifiably nuts. The man is a disgraceful pig. His antics on the witness stand today were beyond outrageous. Lisa Rubin on NBC describes his testimony as “someone who was not in control of his id today.” He’s not in control of his id any day. And yet, he is leading in the battleground states right now because Joe Biden is old and foolish people have bought into his hype that he personally made the economy perfect when he was in office. (It wasn’t, they just have short memories.) It’s infuriating.
Grabier than “Gollum reaching for the One Ring” Filing for the 2024 elections in North Carolina opens in four weeks: at noon on Monday, Dec. 4. Democrats are already in court fighting the usual tricksy maneuvers from the Republican legislature. State Republicans roll their eyes and complain bitterly that Democrats filing lawsuits is more of the same tiresome resistance to their gerrymandered majorities. Naturally, Democrats would not be expending campaign resources on court so often if the GOP was not so routinely engaged in voter disenfranchisement and power grabs. Their latest is a doozy. After Democrat Roy Cooper defeated incumbent Pat McCrory (of HB2 “bathroom bill” fame) in the 2016 election for governor, Republicans called a lame-duck session ostensibly to address hurricane relief. What they really had in mind was changing the composition of election boards and stripping the incoming governor of appointment powers before he could take office.
Then plan carefully This horror story from Florida (where else?) should give anyone pause who lives alone away from relations “as 3 out of 5 Americans in their 80s do.” Or if you have a family member who does (Washington Post): When Douglas Hulse pulled his Ford Mustang convertible into a Florida gas station three years ago, he looked so distressed that someone called 911. An ambulance rushed him to Orlando Health South Seminole Hospital, where doctors said he had a stroke. At 80, the retired pilot who had flown famous passengers around the country could no longer care for himself. […] A hospital can be liable if a patient is discharged into an unsafe environment. Because Hulse lived alone and the hospital officials saw no sign that he had family, that put them in a bind when his health didn’t improve. So they argued in court that he was no longer capable of making his own decisions and needed a guardian — a caretaker with enormous legal power. Medicare “pays the hospital by diagnosis, not length of stay,” so when Hulse started costing the hospital money, they quickly washed their hands of him.