The press decided to pivot to Old Brandon Dan Pfeiffer in his newsletter today takes it to the media for their coverage of Biden’s age. After watching Meet the Press today, I’m fed up: Here’s how the self-proclaimed paper of record decided to report on President Biden’s grueling 5-day trip to Asia. Nearly every line of the story is rage-inducing, but this might be the most annoying part: I promise you that the apparatchiks at the Trump campaign are high-fiving over the fact that they got the New York Times to push their chosen narrative about Biden even though the entire trip undermined that narrative. It’s not just the New York Times, the Associated Press recently headlined a story on their new poll with this atrocity: “Trump has problems of his own.” Hmm, I wonder what those could possibly be. Do people not like his policy platform? Are they concerned about his position on Social Security? Or maybe Trump’s problems have something to do with the fact that HE HAS BEEN CHARGED WITH 91 FELONIES IN FOUR CASES IN FOUR JURISDICTIONS!
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Timothy Snyder on the dangers of the fantasy that the oligarchs will save us: The Silicon Valley oligarch, perhaps the richest man in the world, extends a hand to his fellow oligarch, the man who has his finger on Russia’s nuclear button. They share a secret about the foolishness of the masses, and take action to save us all from ourselves. Thanks to the two of them, the world is saved from Armageddon. Not the precis of a favourably reviewed work of dystopian fiction but a scenario presented as though it happened, in a biography of Elon Musk and its press campaign. Although neither Musk nor his biographer can get the story straight, it is true that the multibillionaire CEO of X (the platform formerly known as Twitter) refused to extend the coverage of his Starlink satellite communications for the Ukrainian armed forces last autumn. Musk did so because Russians (sometimes he says Putin) told him that a Ukrainian attack on part of Ukraine’s own territory (the Crimean peninsula, occupied by Russia) would lead to a Russian nuclear response.
I keep hearing the right wingers bellow that “they’re coming for your children” and “keep your hands off my kids!” Uh huh: While right-wing groups are mobilizing angry mobs to yell at school board members that parents have the right to control what their children are taught, evangelical pollster George Barna told religious-right activists at the Family Research Council’s “Pray Vote Stand” summit Thursday that it is their duty to try to indoctrinate other people’s children into a “biblical worldview.” Barna, one of the first senior fellows at FRC’s recently established Center for Biblical Worldview, specializes in studying what he calls “SAGE Cons”—Spiritually Active Governance Engaged Conservative Christians. What is most striking about FRC and Barna’s “worldview” project is how few people—and how few conservative evangelicals—measure up to their right-wing “biblical worldview” standard.
DeSantis should be held liable for this malfeasance Will Bunch takes on the latest far-right GOP plot to kill Americans. That’s not really hyperbole. The way they behave about public health is a crime. It’s one thing to tell people to be practical and do what they can to protect themselves and others without requiring lockdowns or mandates. That seems to be the consensus as we go into this new surge. But to say the vaccines are dangerous is just plain evil. They just don’t give a damn about the vulnerable people in our country. I guess that’s nothing new. But it’s never been more obvious. The initial, overrepeated mantra of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign was that “Florida is the state where ‘woke’ goes to die.” Now, a growing number of scientists and public-health experts are worried that the governor of America’s third-largest state may be adding a second risk of death to that list. His own citizens.
Technological change is a bumpy road The United Auto Workers are on strike against the Big Three (Washington Post): UAW Ford workers say they are striking because they are not making enough money to support their families or their futures. “We have our limits too,” said Kevin Ewald, a Ford employee who has worked at the company for nearly three decades. He wants his newer colleagues to be paid more for doing “bone-breaking” work. UAW workers began striking just after midnight Friday morning after failing to reach a deal with the Big Three autoworkers, Ford, General Motors and Stellantis. The union demanded 36 percent wage increases for workers over four years, saying that wages have not kept up with inflation. Full-time workers make about $18 to $32 an hour while CEOs at the Big Three companies each made more than $20 million in overallcompensation last year, figures the union used to justify its demands for higher worker wages. The UAW also wants an end to tiered employment system, which means that newer workers get lower pay and have worse benefits.
Get the new booster My friend DocDawg (@AnalyticsEqv) runs a small biotech lab in the Research Triangle and keeps track of things like local wastewater assays for SARS-CoV-2 (above). Have a gander. “This isn’t an ‘uptick,’ it’s a tsunami,” he believes. “Do yourself a favor and wear an N95 in crowded indoor conditions.“ But you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the COVID-19 blows. Several friends have been down with repeat bouts of COVID in the last few weeks. Mild cases, fortunately, but DocDawg believes, “Each reinfection (even mild) increases your risk of Long COVID disability.” Long Covid, he writes caustically, is “the disability whose name must not be spoken b/c fighting it requires infection control, which Dems fear would lose them elections.” I’m back to wearing a mask in stores, although few others do.
Gallup: Labor unions continue to enjoy high support in the U.S., with 67% of Americans approving of them, similar to the elevated level seen in recent years after more than a decade of rising support. Mirroring this trend, Americans have gradually become more likely than a decade ago to want unions’ influence to strengthen and to believe unions benefit various aspects of business and the economy. In contrast to the incremental changes seen in U.S. adults’ support of unions over time, the new poll documents an unprecedented uptick since the prior measure, in 2018, in perceptions that unions in the country will become stronger in the future than they are today. A third of Americans (34%) believe this today, compared with 19% five years ago and no more than 25% at any time in the trend since 1999. Union Approval Steady Near Recent High Point The 67% of Americans who approve of labor unions today is down slightly from 71% a year ago but marks the fifth straight year this reading has exceeded its long-term average of 62%. Here’s Trump, ignorant as always: EXCLUSIVE: Ahead of the UAW strike, Kristen Welker asked fmr. Pres. Trump whose side he's on in negotiations.
With the ongoing hysteria over Biden’s age, it’s long past time to look more closely at Trump’s mental gyrations which are much more indicative of a disordered mind which, along with his massive psychological defects, is getting worse every day. Here are some examples from this weekend alone. Watch this whole thing to see him try in vain to pretend he didn’t stumble and becomes even more incoherent. It’s pathetic. Trump: As you know, crooked Joe Biden and the radical left thugs who have weaponized law enforcement to arrest their leading political opponent that leading by a lot, including Obama pic.twitter.com/T5mx6LhH5D — Acyn (@Acyn) September 16, 2023 “You have voted ID to buy a loaf of bread” — Trump still doesn’t know how buying groceries works pic.twitter.com/XI61Qva8yA — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 16, 2023 You know people have told him that isn’t true and the press has certainly covered this as a gaffe. It’s not the only way to express this concept. He could say that you have to show ID to get on an airplane, for instance.
Or maybe she just sees a new career move: Jenna Ellis – the Donald Trump lawyer who like the former president faces criminal charges regarding attempted election subversion in his defeat by Joe Biden in 2020 – says she will not vote for him in the future because he is a “malignant narcissist” who cannot admit mistakes. “I simply can’t support him for elected office again,” Ellis said. “Why I have chosen to distance is because of that frankly malignant narcissistic tendency to simply say that he’s never done anything wrong.” Ellis, 38, was speaking on her show on American Family Radio, a rightwing evangelical network run by the American Family Association, a non-profit that by its own description has been “on the frontlines of America’s culture war” since 1977. Ellis was one of 18 Trump associates charged with him in Georgia over attempts to overturn Biden’s victory there. Charged with violating state anti-racketeering laws and solicitation of violation of an oath by a public officer, she was granted $100,000 bail and pleaded not guilty.
I’m shocked. It was only a matter of time before this clash manifested somewhere: This city of 28,000 was once so Polish it was dubbed “Little Warsaw.” But in recent decades, an influx of immigrants gave Hamtramck new character. Bengali and Arabic joined English on signs at City Hall. Yemeni and Bangladeshi mosques, restaurants and shops proliferated. And last year, a Muslim who emigrated from Yemen as a teenager became mayor — the city’s first leader in nearly a century with no Polish roots — alongside what is believed to be the nation’s only all-Muslim city council. Many residents in this tiny enclave just north of downtown Detroit saw these changes as a sign of the Hamtramck’s progressiveness. The Muslim community that had previously experienced discrimination, including voter intimidation and resistance to mosques’ public call to prayer, had finally taken its seats at the table. Yet the ethnic, cultural and religious diversity that made Hamtramck something of a model is being put severely to the test.