“Unliveable in 20 years”? A tweet from Austin, Texas got my attention the first thing this morning. “It’s been hotter before, but this is the most miserable I can ever remember Texas weather feeling. First day of summer and the heat index is 120 at 5pm. The state is going to be unlivable in 20 years,” said freelance journalist Christopher Hooks. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes replied, “I really think people vastly underestimate the effect that climate change is going to have on the livability of the Sun Belt.” Saul Elbein, a staff writer for The Hill from Austin, cites the media for decades of failure to properly warn the public of the risks posed by climate change. Scientists themselves have too long “soft-pedaled” climate change, allowing motivated doubters to write them off as acceptable long-term risks: The findings published Monday in Nature Climate Change suggest a fundamental weakness in the past 30 years of communication by climate scientists: a profound difficulty in assessing the possible impacts of breakdowns in the Earth’s biggest and most complex systems.
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Dan Pfeiffer has some ideas: Eight months ago, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was the great hope of the establishment Republicans who never liked Trump but supported him nonetheless. After a huge reelection victory in previously purple Florida, DeSantis was the hottest ticket in Republican politics. Billionaire Super PAC donors and highly sought-after political operatives flocked to Florida to sign up with DeSantis’s campaign in waiting. By almost every measure, the DeSantis campaign has been a resounding flop. His announcement was a technological and political disaster. His awkward and cold interactions with voters became an Internet meme. DeSantis trails Trump in every poll and looks smaller and weaker than his chief rival. Now, this could all change – and quickly. Joe Biden was written off in the 2020 Democratic primaries, as were previous nominees like John McCain and John Kerry. Obama was left for dead by the pundits more times than I care to count. A new CNN poll conducted after the second indictment week showed Trump losing some of his standing with Republican voters (although still leading DeSantis by 21 points).
Following up on Tom’s post below, here’s Jonathan Chait who takes John Durham downtown: Former special counsel John Durham, who tried and utterly failed to prove that the Russia investigation was a vast anti-Trump conspiracy, testified Wednesday before the House about his work. Durham’s hearing interestingly revealed a possible explanation for why he threw away a sterling reputation to work with William Barr fruitlessly pursuing a right-wing conspiracy theory: The man seems to have become so hopelessly brain-poisoned by Fox News he has lost all touch with facts outside the Republican information bubble. More specifically, Durham seemed to be unaware of the major factual elements of the alliance between the Trump campaign and Russia. This ignorance came through in several awkward exchanges with Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee panel.
From 538: When Theresa M. started attending a support group for breast cancer survivors, she didn’t expect political issues like abortion to be a part of the conversation. But since last summer, when her home state of Florida — freed from the requirements of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court — began imposing new abortion restrictions, younger women who were newly diagnosed with breast cancer started to voice concerns. “They worry if you find out you’re pregnant, you might have to stop your cancer treatment,” said Theresa, who is 58 and asked that her full name be withheld for personal reasons. “For some kinds of cancer, that’s a death sentence. But not an immediate death sentence, so you don’t get an abortion.” Like many other Americans, Theresa’s views on abortion crystallized in the aftermath of last summer’s ruling, becoming sharper and harder to reshape. An issue that was once seen primarily as a mobilizing force for the religious right has risen to the forefront at the state and national level.
And the other one has always been intellectually and morally challenged. Now….? The networks don’t seem to realize this. Or they don’t care: In the week following President Joe Biden’s April campaign launch, CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC continuously emphasized Biden’s age, mentioning it 588 times, while mentioning former President Donald Trump’s age only 72 times. On April 25, Biden announced his reelection bid for 2024. Biden, largely focused on campaigning to protect “freedoms” against “MAGA extremism,” has long dealt with right-wing criticism of his age. In the week following his campaign announcement, Biden’s age and mental “fitness” were repeatedly topics of conversation across cable news. CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC often described Biden’s age as his campaign’s biggest hurdle.
Cutting Medicare and SS is in their DNA I’m sure you remember that moment. [S]etting aside the noteworthy yet individual promises from Republican politicians, earlier this year, in a quick-witted maneuver, President Joe Biden got dozens of Republicans to collectively agree they would not cut funding for Medicare or Social Security during his State of the Union speec “Instead of making the wealthy pay their fair share, some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset. I’m not saying it’s the majority,” Biden said. Republicans quickly cut him off with shouts of “No!,” coupled with visible head shakes and thumbs downs. Your favorite heckler Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) even stood up to shout, “Liar!” at Biden. He continued, going off script,“So folks, as we all apparently agree, Social Security and Medicare is off the books now, right?” Republicans began applauding in response to his question. “Alright, we got unanimity!” Biden replied.
Norms are values systems Left, right. Liberal, conservative. We reflexively map out political morphology in America as dichotomies. Us, them. Urban, rural. The problem the country faces as tensions build across the modern political divide is that the framework of the United States of America, flaws and all, is built upon a set of values the framers shared: self-evident truths, unalienable rights, a government built to promote justice, domestic tranquility, the general welfare, etc. Even then, agreement was not universal. The colonies were home to federalists and antifederalists, slave states and free, colonial rebels and Tories/Royalists. Dahlia Lithwick and Michael Podhorzer imply that it was always thus, that the greater “We the People” never really shared those values, the same truths, or else did not view them the same way. How left and right view governance today reflects the same contrasts. Donald Trump saw the Department of Justice as “his” to deploy against enemies. Joe Biden left the prosecutor investigating his own son in place.
Are we wired to see it that way? Adam Mastroianni’s surveys may explain our persistent gloominess (New York Times): Two well-established psychological phenomena could combine to produce this illusion of moral decline. First, there’s biased exposure: People predominantly encounter and pay attention to negative information about others — mischief and misdeeds make the news and dominate our conversations. Second, there’s biased memory: The negativity of negative information fades faster than the positivity of positive information. Getting dumped, for instance, hurts in the moment, but as you rationalize, reframe and distance yourself from the memory, the sting fades. The memory of meeting your current spouse, on the other hand, probably still makes you smile. When you put these two cognitive mechanisms together, you can create an illusion of decline. Thanks to biased exposure, things look bad every day. But thanks to biased memory, when you think back to yesterday, you don’t remember things being so bad. When you’re standing in a wasteland but remember a wonderland, the only reasonable conclusion is that things have gotten worse.
Meanwhile, the “Trump Crime Family” keeps on criming Something real finally happened in the Hunter Biden saga besides all the innuendo and gossip that has had the right wing in a permanent state of titillation and excitement for the past few years. Yesterday morning he was charged with three crimes. U.S. Attorney David Weiss, (a Trump appointee who the former president was very proud to nominate saying he “shares the President’s vision ”) released a letter laying out the charges: The first Information charges the defendant with tax offenses—namely, two counts of willful failure to pay federal income tax, in violation of 26 U.S.C. § 7203. The defendant has agreed to plead guilty to both counts of the tax Information. The second Information charges the defendant with a firearm offense—namely, one count of possession of a firearm by a person who is an unlawful user of or addicted to a controlled substance, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3) and 924(a)(2) (2018). The defendant has agreed to enter a Pretrial Diversion Agreement with respect to the firearm Information.
It’s not pretty. Not pretty at all.