I don’t know how many of you remember the resignation of NY Times reporter Donald MacNeil during the height of the COVID pandemic and if you don’t, the details are all right here. Without taking a position on the merits of the pressure he was under, I do think it was unfortunate that he had to leave at the time he did because he was a great science reporter in the middle of a once in a century pandemic. We lost something valuable. His newsletter today shows just what we lost. He takes on the NY Times’ truly shitty treatment of Dr. Anthony Fauci at the hands of Benjamim Wallace-Wells the other day. This is just the opening. I urge you to read the whole thing: I love science-fiction series like “The Man in the High Castle” because they force us to question our ingrained assumption that history was always ordained to turn out as it did. It was set in 1950’s America after the Allies lost World War II. Germany had beaten us to The Bomb, vaporized Washington and stormed ashore at Virginia Beach. Berlin and Tokyo had divided the U.S. between them. Most Americans were cowed but prospering under the new regime.
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While he’s running for president It appears that they also tried to recreate the fiction that Scotland is thrilled to have Trump visiting. He said “It’s good to be home” when he arrived which is a very weird thing to say when you’re running for president of the United States. But whatever. The fact that he’s still doing business abroad and has no plans to divest if he were to win another term gets no coverage in the media. It’s just a given that he’ll run his business from the White House as he did before. This is just sad: He’s going to Ireland next. I think he’s expecting a big welcome like Biden received when he was there a couple of weeks ago. Not gonna happen. This pathetic little display is about the best he can hope for.
“Incredibly bad luck, bad place” Yes, sitting in the bullpen at a baseball game is a very bad place. You could get shot at any time. You really should be more careful. An 18-year-old baseball player is recovering after being struck by a bullet during a game Saturday afternoon at George Dobson Field at Spring Lake Park. The Texas A&M University-Texarkana player was hit once in the chest as he sat in the left field bullpen during an Eagles game, said Shawn Vaughn, Texarkana Texas Police Department spokesman. The incident happened about 6 p.m. The player was taken to a local hospital for emergency surgery. Vaughn said it does not appear anyone was the target of the shooting. The stray bullet seems to have been fired from a neighborhood near the ballfield. “Incredibly bad luck, bad place,” Vaughn said. Around the time of the shooting, police were alerted to shots being fired from cars traveling through a nearby neighborhood, Vaughn said. The shooting happened about the fifth inning of the Eagles’ game against the University of Houston-Victoria. “The announcer said, ‘Shots fired!
This one was particularly egregious: The fallout came fast whenFlorida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s new election police unit charged Peter Washington with voter fraud last summer as part of a crackdown against felons who’d allegedly broken the law by casting a ballot. The Orlando residentlost his job supervising irrigation projects, and along with it, his family’s health insurance. His wife dropped her virtual classes at Florida International University to help pay their rent. Future plans went out the window. “It knocked me to my knees, if you want to know the truth,” he said. But not long after, the case against Washington began falling apart. A Ninth Judicial Circuit judge ruled the statewide prosecutor who filed the charges didn’t actually have jurisdiction to do so. Washington’s attorney noted that he had received an official voter identification card in the mail after registering. The case was dismissed in February. One by one, many of the initial 20 arrests announced by the Office of Election Crimes and Security have stumbled in court. Six cases have been dismissed. Five other defendants accepted plea deals that resulted in no jail time.
Get a load of the new young guns Michelle Cottle in the NY Times: Here’s a head scratcher for you: What happens when the leadership of a political party becomes so extreme, so out of touch with its voters, that it alienates many of its own activists and elected officials? And what happens when some of those officials set up a parallel infrastructure that lets them circumvent the party for campaign essentials such as fund-raising and voter turnout? At what point does this party become mostly a bastion of wingnuts, spiraling into chaos and irrelevance? No need to waste time guessing. Just cast your eyes upon Georgia, one of the nation’s electoral battlegrounds, where the state Republican Party has gone so far down the MAGA rabbit hole that many of its officeholders — including Gov. Brian Kemp, who romped to re-election last year despite being targeted for removal by Donald Trump — are steering clear of it as if it’s their gassy grandpa at Sunday supper.
This piece by Jenny Boylan is a super important read if you want to understand what transgenderism really is all about. I would imagine that most who read this site believe that all people should have the right to live their lives as they choose and support the rights of transgender people to live freely in our society. This goes much deeper: There they are, in their Chevrolet Colorado, five dudes bouncing up and down as the truck grinds through the rugged American high country. Two guys up front, three in the back. Shania Twain is blasting. The fellow in the middle is singing along. “Oh, I want to be free, yeah, to feel the way I feel. Man, I feel like a woman!” The other guys look deeply worried. But the person in the back just keeps happily singing away, even as the dude next to him moves his leg away. Just to be on the safe side. This commercial aired back in 2004, and even now it’s not clear to me if it’s offensive or empowering, hilarious or infuriating. Twain says she wrote “Man! I Feel Like a Woman” after working at a resort where some drag queens were performing. “That song started with the title,” she said.
That’s the most popular show on Fox News. They were beating Tucker before he was fired. Gutfield is very popular too. Just thought I’d share that with you. Have a nice evening.
It’s been on the GOP’s chopping block for decades E.J. Dionne notes this morning, as I did, how President Joe Biden’s 2024 launch video leads with the word “Freedom.” Biden deployed it six times in all. He means to reclaim that brand from the faux patriots. “Joe Biden has made defending our basic freedoms the cause of his presidency,” the ad declares. Before continuing, Dionne asks readers to hold their skepticism until he’s fleshed out what that means. Franklin D. Roosevelt made “four freedoms” the centerpiece of one his most important speeches: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear. Since then, Democrats have ceded freedom to conservatives, preferring in Dionne’s telling, “to talk about justice, equality, democracy, fairness or community.” “The chance to live a life of your choosing, in keeping with your values: that is freedom in its richest sense,” Pete Buttigieg declared during his 2020 run for the presidency.
The more they warn, the less we’ll listen Technology has a momentum all its own. It has a tendency to take us places before we consider whether they are places we need to or ought to go, I wrote here in 2014. Following up on Danielle Allen’s warnings about artificial general intelligence, A.I. pioneer Dr. Geoffrey Hinton gets space in the New York Times to express his concerns: Dr. Hinton said he has quit his job at Google, where he has worked for more than decade and became one of the most respected voices in the field, so he can freely speak out about the risks of A.I. A part of him, he said, now regrets his life’s work. Hinton, “the Godfather of A.I.,” worries what his creation may do when loosed “into the wild,” as the Times’ Cade Metz puts it.
Democrats have learned they cannot appease terrorist Republicans If you think that old dogs can’t learn new tricks you need to take a look at Joe Biden. Back in 2011, during the first serious Republican debt ceiling hostage crisis and the protracted negotiations that followed, Biden undercut Senate Majority leader Harry Reid and wrecked a deal he had made for a terrible one. There was a lot of hand-wringing at the time over Biden’s tendency to give away the store so when the Republicans pulled their hostage maneuver again in 2013, Reid stipulated that Biden needed to stay out of the negotiations — and the White House agreed. The Obama administration, including Biden, had learned their lesson: Negotiating with the extremist GOP on the debt ceiling is a very bad idea. They refused and the Republicans capitulated, sparing the country and the world economy another jolt. The days of dreaming about a “Grand Bargain” were blessedly over. You may have noticed that we never had one of these fights during the Trump years when the deficit was growing at a very fast pace.