People think I’m over the top by calling Marjorie Taylor Greene the “shadow speaker.” I’m not: Days after he won his gavel in a protracted fight with hard-right Republicans, Speaker Kevin McCarthy gushed to a friend about the ironclad bond he had developed with an unlikely ally in his battle for political survival, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. “I will never leave that woman,” Mr. McCarthy, a California Republican, told the friend, who described the private conversation on the condition of anonymity. “I will always take care of her.” Such a declaration from Mr. McCarthy would have been unthinkable in 2021, when Ms. Greene first arrived on Capitol Hill in a swirl of controversy and provocation. A former QAnon follower who had routinely trafficked in conspiratorial, violent and bigoted statements, Ms. Greene was then widely seen as a dangerous liability to the party and a threat to the man who aspired to lead Republicans back to the majority — a person to be controlled and kept in check, not embraced. But in the time since, a powerful alliance developed between Ms.
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This piece in the NY Times about the boomer vote tracks with my instincts. First of all, the youngest boomers aren’t even 60 yet so not all of us are ancient. Biden, for instance is not a boomer. He’s older. Trump was born in the very first year of the baby boom so he’s at the very oldest edge. The truth is that there were always a fair number in that large generation who were conservative. Not everyone was a hippie. And yes, some moved right as they aged. It seems to just happen with some people. But many, many boomers were and have, as I have, been very liberal their whole lives. And they’re still fighting the good fight. Is it time to call the next election “the most important in American history”? Probably. It seems like it may involve a judgment on democracy itself. Americans with a lot of history will play a key role in determining its outcome. And judging in part by November’s midterms, they may not play the role that older voters are usually assigned. We at Third Act, the group we helped form in 2021, think older Americans are beginning a turn in the progressive direction, a turn that will accelerate as time goes on.
I said to a young friend the other day that this might be the best job market they will ever experience and she looked at me like I was crazy. I get it. When you’re young the experiences you have had limit your understanding of what it’s like when things change. When you are old (like me) you’ve been through some stuff and you have a different outlook. This piece in the NY Times looks at the different ways the generations are experiencing the contraction in the tech sector: When Lyft laid off 13 percent of its workers in November, Kelly Chang was shocked to find herself among the 700 people who lost their jobs at the San Francisco company. “It seemed like tech companies had so much opportunity,” said Ms. Chang, 26. “If you got a job, you made it. It was a sustainable path.” Brian Pulliam, on the other hand, brushed off the news that the crypto exchange Coinbase was eliminating his job. Ever since the 48-year-old engineer was laid off from his first job at the video game company Atari in 2003, he said, he has asked himself once a year: “If I were laid off, what would I do?” The contrast between Ms.
This is how right wingers have fun I have no words: Body-camera footage and images of the night Breonna Taylor was killed in 2020 were shown in front of diners at a Kentucky restaurant this week during an event in which a GOP women’s group hosted one of the officers who fired into Taylor’s apartment, according to an NAACP chapter and accounts from patrons. The Republican Women’s Club of South Central Kentucky held a dinner event Tuesday at Anna’s Greek Restaurant in Bowling Green, Ky., for Jonathan Mattingly, a former sergeant with the Louisville Metro Police Department who was among the officers who conducted the botched no-knock raid at Taylor’s Louisville apartment in search of her ex-boyfriend. Mattingly, who was one of the officers who fired into the 26-year-old Black woman’s apartment the night she died, was cleared of wrongdoing in an internal police investigation and retired in 2021 to become a conservative author and pundit.
So sad… It appears that he’s not going to be able to wrap up the nomination the way he expected: Advisers to Donald Trump have blanketed South Carolina Republican officials with pleading phone calls in recent weeks in an effort to drum up endorsements and attendees for the former president’s first campaign swing of the 2024 cycle next week. But the appeals have run headlong into a complicated new reality: Many of the state’s lawmakers and political operatives, and even some of his previous supporters, are not ready to pick a presidential candidate. After raising the debt limit for decades, Republicans in recent years have leveraged it to enact spending cuts while also threatening government default. (Video: JM Rieger/The Washington Post) They find themselves divided between their support for Trump, their desire for a competitive nomination fight in the state and their allegiance to two South Carolina natives, former governor Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott, who have taken steps to challenge Trump for the nomination.
Scotland has no shortage of dreadful right wing judges, but as the very epitome of reactionary conservatism, one gobsmacking judgment from Perth Sheriff Michael Fletcher stands out. In a major rowing back of Scotland’s right to roam legislation contained in the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003, Sheriff Fletcher ruled that plebs must not be allowed […]
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John Bezzini, author of Buzz’s Beatles Book Blog, recently brought to our attention a rare recording and book involving The Iveys, the Apple Records band that eventually was renamed Badfinger. The book was titled “Young London: Permissive Paradise,” a look … Continue reading
The evil genius of clown politics George Santos (if that is his name) is more than a Strangelovian political farce. More than a Republican “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love a Bum.” Merely laughing at him, writes The Atlantic‘s David Graham, is missing the darker implications for our politics. Do not let your amusement, he warns, “eclipse the horror of such a candidate reaching office and the consequences for Congress and the American political system’s remaining shreds of repute.” Yes, Santos (if that is his name) duped voters in his district. Yes, he ought to be investigated for laws he may have broken in running. But the fact of his being elected just two years after a violent insurrection instigated over bogus allegations of a stolen election adds an element of tragedy. The fact that Santos (if that is his name) ran and won election to the U.S. House as an even phonier business success than Donald J.
Remember the fuss over a different one? The twice-impeached, much-investigated instigator of the Jan. 6 insurrection was in North Carolina on Saturday for the memorial service of Ineitha Lynette Hardaway, a.k.a. “Diamond” of the right-wing political duo Diamond and Silk. The memorial service at Fayetteville’s Crown Theater was not the political rally for himself that Donald Trump had hoped. Size matters to him. He didn’t get it. The Fayetteville Observer reports that just over 150 people attended the event in the theater that holds 2,400. Donald Trump’s audience was smaller and the event took longer than he’d expected. Still, the memorial service did resemble a Trump rally. Yes, the pillow guy was at Hardaway’s funeral … to praise Donald Trump. Trump’s eulogy had plenty of his usual shtick. Those of a certain age will recall what a fuss Republicans and conservative pundits raised in 2002 over the memorial service for Sen. Paul Wellstone of Minnesota.
For those of you who remember the embarrassment of the Times coverage of the “Whitewater” scandal, it must seem like déjà vu all over again. It does to me. The paper’s editors are trying, and I mean really trying, to make the Biden classified documents issue a thing. And I mean a grave thing. The stage was ably set by the subject line of the email I received blasting out their latest deep dive on the story: “Inside Biden’s 68 days of silence.” It’s this like a Gabriel García Márquez homage? I mean good lord. Are we really doing this again? Of course we are. It’s how they roll. I took the liberty of a short set of annotations. That’s from Josh Marshall who does an excellent job of analyzing the rapidly escalating hysteria around Joe Biden’s classified documents. I, of course, remember Whitewater as I’m sure quite a few of you do too.