She and her accomplices built a political party based upon bigotry and hate. They approve of torture and celebrate death. They addicted their followers to conspiracy theories and rank tribalism. Old people like me watched it happen over time and it was just slow enough that we didn’t see the full scope of how ignorant and nihilistic their movement had become until Trump came along. Young people see them for what they are — and they are appalled. They and their friends don’t want to live in a country where people like this are in charge. They have large numbers and they are engaged and active. As for the issues of abortion, guns and climate change, young people know hypocrites when they see them and they won’t be fooled by insincere outreach efforts. And they will be insincere because Republicans have trained their own voters over many years to believe that abortion is murder, unfettered gun rights are inalienable and climate change is a hoax. Nobody will be able to thread that needle. All that’s on top of the fact that they are racist, homophobic and transphobic, misogynist monsters. And then there’s this: Good luck Kellyanne…
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And they love him Ron Brownstein on Trump’s trump card: Even amid all his legal challenges, Donald Trump has a secret weapon in his drive to win the Republican presidential nomination next year: polling strongly suggests he has transformed the GOP primary electorate in a way that will make him harder to beat. Since Trump’s emergence as the GOP’s dominant figure in 2016, the college-educated voters generally most skeptical of him have declined as a share of all GOP primary voters, while the voters without a college degree generally most sympathetic to him have increased, an array of public and private polls indicate. Those changes suggest Trump has set in motion what could prove a self-fulfilling prophecy: compared to when he first captured the nomination in 2016, he’s encouraged more participation in the Republican primaries by the blue-collar voters most inclined to support him and less by the white-collar voters likely to become the centerpiece of any coalition against him. “There’s no question about it,” says long-time GOP pollster Whit Ayres.
I loved MAD Magazine so much as a kid that I think it may have been my greatest influence (for better or worse.) And I loved the Fold-in. Al Jaffee was a hero and I’m not surprised to learn that he had an incredibly interesting life: Al Jaffee, a cartoonist who folded in when the trend in magazine publishing was to fold out, thereby creating one of Mad magazine’s most recognizable and enduring features, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 102. His death, at a hospital, was caused by multi-system organ failure, his granddaughter Fani Thomson said. It was in 1964 that Mr. Jaffee created the Mad Fold-In, an illustration-with-text feature on the inside of the magazine’s back cover that seemed at first glance to deliver a straightforward message. When the page was folded in thirds, however, both illustration and text were transformed into something entirely different and unexpected, often with a liberal-leaning or authority-defying message.
Enraging!!!!!!: Anya Cook did not want to push. But sitting on the toilet, legs splayed wide, she knew she didn’t have a choice. She was about to deliver her baby alone in the bathroom of a hair salon. On this Thursday afternoon in mid-December, about five months before her due date, she knew the baby would not be born alive. Cook tried to tune out the easy chatter outside, happy women with working wombs catching up with their hairdresser.At 36, she’d already experienced a long line of miscarriages, but none of the pregnancies had been more than five weeks along. Now she hadto deliver a nearly 16-week fetus — a daughter she’d planned to call Bunny. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. As soon as the fetus hit the water, blood started flowingbetween her thighs. Blood splattered on the white toilet seat and across the floor. She panicked, her hands shaking as she picked up her phone to call her husband, Derick. “Baby,” she said, “I need you to come to the bathroom.” Over the course of the day, according to medical records, Cook would lose roughly half the blood in her body.
Chomsky and Prashad: Cuba is not a state sponsor of terrorism Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad February 12, 2023. Peoples Dispatch. Cuba, a country of eleven million people, has been under an illegal embargo by the United States government for over six decades. Despite this embargo, Cuba’s people have been able to transcend the indignities […]
Republicans are fighting a cold civil war “The doomsday prepper of the past has become a mainstay of rightwing culture,” Jeff Sharlet (The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War) said recently of scattered rural militiamen. Elected Republicans in control of state legislatures don’t need AR-15s to fight their cold civil war. They are manipulating democracy to undo democracy in full view of state capitol and national press. The Republican majority voted to expel three Democrats from the Tennessee state House last week for what they insisted were breaches of decorum in loudly calling for action against gun violence. They kept the white woman, Rep. Gloria Johnson (barely), and expelled two young Black men. The Nashville Metropolitan Council voted 36-0 Monday to reinstate Justin Jones to the position Republicans revoked last week. Justin Pearson of Memphis is expected to be reinstated when the Shelby County Board of Commissioners meets on Wednesday. Pardon the cliche, but if you haven’t noticed that MAGA Republicans have declared war on representative democracy, you haven’t been paying attention.
The weapons are similar too Teens and college students across the country protested the war in Vietnam not just because of disagreements over U.S. foreign policy. Their lives were on the line. Or their brothers’ or their friends’ or their husbands’. Hundreds of students, parents and teachers protested against gun violence inside the Tennessee state House on April 6 for the same reason. Lives are on the line. Theirs and friends’ and their kids’. We watched Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear in a Monday press conference hold back tears after friends were shot and one killed in a mass shooting at a bank in Louisville. How long will these daily shootings go on unchecked before each of us is personally affected the same way, if not shot ourselves? Hope for our democracy and for an end to the daily slaughter may lie with the young. This is their Vietnam. Ironically, the weapon of choice in many of these shootings is a variant of those the Pentagon sent in bulk to Southeast Asia 60 years ago.
AI is here and it will change everything! OMG the sky is falling! Programmers are now obsolete. No, they are needed more than ever before. Large language models will destroy journalism, democracy, society. No, they will free us from drudgery and we will all be happier. Cancer will be solved because of AI. AI’s hallucinations […]
(Some thoughts on the efforts to regulate children’s use of social media) Have you noticed how many people ages 65+ watch television every day? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, almost 90% of those in this age bracket watch TV Every.Single.Day!!!! ::gasp:: And that data was collected before the pandemic! By <hand-waving logics of a […]