DeSantis is running it I’ve been making this point for a while but here’s some direct evidence that DeSantis is consciously copying the Hungarian prime minister (and Tucker Carlson’s) “illiberal democracy” playbook from Media Matters: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and anti-civil rights activist Christopher Rufo are waging a campaign against New College of Florida that strongly resembles actions taken by Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister Viktor Orbán in 2017 and 2018 to shut down Central European University. DeSantis appointed Rufo, known for his anti-Black and anti-LGBTQ messaging propaganda, to the board of trustees at New College of Florida in early January. Since then, Rufo has engaged in what amounts to a hostile takeover of the school, forcing the president out and attempting to reinvent the school as a conservative institution. The scheme echoes Orbán’s plot to force CEU out of Hungary just years earlier.
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Stuart Stevens on Democrats and the usefulness of the culture wars: For decades it has been a given in American politics that Republicans are masters of “cultural wars” and Democrats should avoid engaging. That might have been true at one time, but as a long-time veteran of Republican campaigns, I think it’s time for Democrats to run toward the sound of the guns in cultural wars. Not only can Democrats win cultural wars, they are winning them, even if they don’t seem to understand their potential electoral benefits. In the Trump era, MAGA Republicans attacked Nike for supporting Colin Kaepernick and his campaign to highlight racial injustice with police. At a 2017 rally in Alabama for Senator Luther Strange, Trump thundered, “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out! He’s fired. He’s fired!’” In September, before the 2018 midterms, Mitch McConnell’s long-time top political aide, DC lobbyist Josh Holmes, touted the political impact of attacking the NFL.
The cutest baby ever: Conservationists at Chester Zoo become the first in Europe to successfully breed a rare Coquerel’s sifaka lemur. The precious youngster arrived to parents Beatrice (10) and Elliot (10) – 18 months after the duo were translocated from the USA to Chester Zoo to begin a vital new conservation breeding programme, designed to protect the crtically endangered primates from extinction. Born with a thick fuzzy white coat and weighing just 119 grams, experts say the baby will cling tightly to mum’s belly for several weeks, before riding on her back like a backpack until around six months old. Currently only seven of the rare primates are cared for in three zoos in Europe and the family trio at Chester are the only Coquerel’s sifaka to live in the UK. Conservationists at the zoo say the birth is a ‘landmark moment’ for the species that is on the brink of extinction in the wild. “It’s really exciting to be the first team of conservationists in Europe to successfully breed this unusual and extremely rare primate. “While it’s still early days, both mum and baby are doing great.
This week, Cathy from Velvet Crisis was published in The Guardian saying how she'd joined a band as part of the unglamorous music project, so here's a blog post about what Velvet Crisis have been doing.
Unglamorous music is a very specific approach to learning, aimed at women - but applicable to anyone lacking in confidence and experience of playing.
Well, here we go again: One of the most accomplished pop music composers of the 20th century, Burt Bacharach, has died at age 94. The musical maestro behind 52 top 40 hits including “Alfie,” “Walk on By,” “Promises, Promises,” “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” “What the World Needs Now is Love” and “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?,” Bacharach had an untouchable run in the 1960s and 1970s with a wide range of pop, R&B and soul artists. According to the Associated Press, Bacharach died on Wednesday (Feb. 8) at his home in Los Angeles of natural causes. Working with lyricist partner Hal David, Bacharach and David were dubbed the “Rodgers & Hart” of the ’60s, with a unique style featuring instantly hummable melodies and atypical arrangements that folded in everything from jazz and pop to Brazilian grooves and rock.
Who’s “out of touch” now? MAGA Republicans have turned so far inward that they are speaking to an increasingly thinner — and weirder — slice of America. I’ll admit that I did not subject myself to the Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R) response to the State of the Union Address on Tuesday. But clips and accounts suggest how far down the MAGA rabbit hole she and her party have gone. Paul Krugman wites this morning: So as Greg Sargent of The Washington Post points out, it was remarkable that Sanders spoke largely in right-wing insider jargon. She boasted of eliminating C.R.T. in her state, without even explaining the abbreviation; how many Americans know that it stands for “critical race theory,” let alone why that’s supposed to be such a bad thing? For that matter, focus groups suggest that most people don’t know what “wokeness” means, or why they should fear it.
Quit fixating on the Beltway sideshow If you missed Digby’s Thursday post on what’s happening in the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, go back and review. All the political mishchief is not happening on Capitol Hill. The Marc Elias Democracy Docket newsletter this morning warns yet again to pay attention to what”s happening in red state courts dominated by MAGA judges: North Carolina (for better or worse) elects its judges and Democrats failed to hold the state Supreme Court in November. Turnout was disappointing. There are multiple reasons why. Among them: For those wondering why North Carolina Democrats including Cheri Beasley fared more poorly than Democrats in other states last November, districting uncertainty (combined with Democrats’ fecklessness in recruiting) meant Democrats in 2022 left 14 of 50 state Senate seats and 30 of 120 state House seats uncontested. Democrats in those districts had no state legislative Democrats to turn out for. Democrats in one-quarter of NC legislative districts, many of them very red, had no reason in 2022 to turn out for local Democrats running for legislative seats because there were none to vote for.
Sarah Huckasanders said the other night that there’s no left and right, there only normal and crazy. I cannot imagine that any sentient being doesn’t automatically understand into which category to put these loons who want to allow children to walk the streets with Ar-15s because they have constitutional rights too —– is stark raving mad. The Republican-controlled Missouri House of Representatives rejected a proposal Wednesday that would have banned children from being able to openly carry firearms on public land without adult supervision. The proposal, which was part of a long debate in the chamber on how to fight crime in St. Louis, was defeated by a vote of 104-39, with just one Republican voting in support of the ban. After the amendment on the open-carry restrictions for minors was initially supported by the Republican legislator sponsoring a broader crime bill, GOP lawmakers on a committee that he leads removed the firearms provision last week. “Every time we talked about the provision related to guns, we knew that was going to be difficult on our side of the aisle,” state Rep.
He hits them from the right … and the left Dark Brandon aimed his death ray at the congressional Republicans in front of the whole country this week and in the process seems to have banished all thoughts of a primary challenge should he decide to seek a second term. Unless something dramatic changes, it appears that the Democrats are not going to have a nomination fight on their hands. The Republicans, on the other hand, look to be gearing up for a knockdown, drag-out, bare-knuckled brawl — and the dynamics already taking shape are fascinating. It was always a good bet that Donald Trump would run again for no other reason than he is the sorest loser in world history and he simply cannot accept that he lost the last election. He didn’t expect to have any rivals, however, assuming that he would receive the nomination by acclamation and not really even have to campaign until the general election. He didn’t realize that his epic pout after the 2020 election would turn off so many GOP suburban voters and no doubt believed that he would be a kingmaker in the 2022 election, reaffirming his position as the only possible candidate.