I have often mused about the belief that the American Constitution is the best of all possible worlds, as least as it was taught when I was in school many moons ago.The Bill of Rights (with one notable exception) is great, laying out the ideals the country was founded on even if we’ve rarely fully lived up to them. The structure of our system, however, isn’t all that great. I’m not sure federalism was such a fabulous idea although I certainly understand why it happened. But there’s a reason no democracy in the world has adopted our system and that most of them have instead a parliamentary system which, frankly, just works better. The Senate was a mistake and the electoral college has turned out to be the train wreck quite a few of the founders predicted it would be. Other countries that once used such a system have gotten rid of it. We should too: The United States is the only democracy in the world where a presidential candidate can get the most popular votes and still lose the election. Thanks to the Electoral College, that has happened five times in the country’s history.
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Sure. The House races are as close as the presidential race. Scott Perry is one of the worst MAGA congressmen in the country. And he’s in trouble: Perry, a former chair of the far-right House Freedom Caucus who was first elected in 2012, had reportedly done plenty to aid former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The FBI seized Perry’s cellphone in 2022, which led to the revelation of text messages showing his extensive attempts to install an attorney general who would help keep Trump in office. Perry’s preferred candidate was Jeffrey Clark, a now-indicted Department of Justice official whose main qualification was spreading claims of election fraud. I started by noting that Perry was the one who’d introduced Trump and Clark. He cut me off. “An introduction?” he said, incredulously. “Is that illegal now?” Perry accused me of repeating “a narrative that has been promoted by the left” that the mainstream media have refused to verify.
Fox interview goes all gotcha, all the time You saw it. I saw it. We all saw it. Vice President Kamala Harris did an interview Wednesday with Fox chief political anchor Bret Baier and, as The New York Times framed it, got a debate instead. Ahead of a third presidential election with Donald Trump — now a convicted felon indicted for inciting an insurrection — as their candidate, MAGA Republicans routinely dodge answering, 1) Did Donald Trump lose in 2020? and 2) Will he/you accept the results? For voters not wanting a replay of Jan. 6, those are pertinent election issues. No, no, no, those are “gotcha” questions, Republicans object, as Speaker Mike Johnson did. (Will no reporter demand they explain what they expect to “get” if they answer?) Inside Fox’s Earth 2 bubble, Baier was all “gotcha” all the time. Baier asked Harris questions to which he really did not want her answers. He was not interested in revealing for his viewers her vision for America’s future. He was litigating the past. Baier interrupted. He talked over. He badgered. He baited. He oh-so-obviously tried to make Harris say Trump voters are stupid.
Keep Jimmy and Dave from Trump’s firing squad You know it. I know it. Mike Johnson and Jim Jordan know it. Donald Trump knows it all the way down to the toenails he can’t trim. Elect Kamala Harris or else Jimmy Kimmel and Dave Bautista will be among the first up against the wall in a Trump dictatorship.
People all over the world are losing everyything they have from hurricanes, tornadoes, flooding and fires. This is what Trump has to say about all that: Fact check, he did not have the cleanest air and water on record, not that it’s relevant to this conversation. He will make everything worse. He’s a moron who has no clue what he’s talking about. But you knew that.
A new biography of Mitch McConnell drawing on his diaries and oral histories has some interesting tidbits: The comments about Trump quoted in the book came in the weeks before the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Trump was then actively trying to overturn his loss to Democrat Joe Biden. McConnell feared this would hurt Republicans in two Georgia runoffs and cost them the Senate majority. Democrats won both races. Publicly, McConnell had congratulated Biden after the Electoral College certified the presidential vote and the senator warned his fellow Republicans not to challenge the results. But he did not say much else. Privately, he said in his oral history that “it’s not just the Democrats who are counting the days” until Trump left office, and that Trump’s behavior “only underscores the good judgment of the American people.
Let’s just say persuasion isn’t on the menu Ed Kilgore outlines the Trump campaign strategy to “win” the election on election day. It won’t surprise you to learn that they aren’t trying to persuade people to vote for him: The Trump campaign, the Republican Party, and its super-PAC allies are devoting a lot of resources to suppressing the Democratic vote in key states. These strategies include: -Insisting on voter-roll purges to eliminate people who don’t respond quickly to official verification inquiries, whether or not they are appropriate. (In the past, overzealous purges have disqualified hundreds of thousands of eligible voters, most notably in Florida in 2000.) -Promoting ridiculously strict rules for mail ballots that don’t have anything to do with their integrity (e.g., tossing them out due to extremely minor address or date errors without the possibility of curing them). -Flooding the polling places with poll watchers trained to challenge individual ballots that might go to Kamala Harris on a variety of sketchy grounds.
Eric Levitz at Vox takes a look at the continuing loss of working class white voters and the analysis shows that unions haven’t turned out to be the great fix everyone thought they would be: The rightward drift of America’s working class disconcerted progressives, who generated a variety of ideas for reversing it. But one of their primary prescriptions could be summarized in a single word: unions. After all, the erosion of Democrats’ working-class support had coincided with the collapse of organized labor in the United States. There were many reasons to think the latter had caused the former. Thus, to prevent Democrats’ working-class support from diminishing further, the thinking went, the party needed to deliver for existing trade unions, whose demands Bill Clinton and Barack Obama had sometimes defied. Meanwhile, to lay the seeds for a broader realignment of working-class voters, Democrats needed to make it easier for workers to organize by reforming federal labor laws. The Biden administration appears to have embraced this analysis.
It can’t be any clearer. As it turns out, the same gentleman who asked Trump about January 6th last night also asked Kamala Harris a question at her Univision town hall last week. He asked her about the rumors that the administration wasn’t doing anything for the hurrican victims and what they planned to do in the future. Watch them back-to-back. Something tells me Mr. González is undecided no more. pic.twitter.com/I35zz3zPY4 — Ms. M 🪷 Read Project 2025 (@MsMalarkey24) October 17, 2024 Guess what? Q: Did you receive the answer you were looking for from Trump? Undecided voter: No Q: You came here undecided to this town hall. Have you made a decision? Undecided voter: I am not going to vote for Trump Q: Did you receive the answer you were looking for from Trump? Undecided voter: No Q: You came here undecided to this town hall. Have you made a decision? Undecided voter: I am not going to vote for Trump https://t.co/LHAsYkjdkb pic.twitter.com/EeEzzrDUOx — Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) October 17, 2024
Harris handles a protester: And then there was that debate: Is she strong enough? You bet she is. And that seems to be the main complaint among those who say they’re not happy with Trump but just don’t think she has the “strength and the stamina” (remember that one?) to be president. It’s sexism, of course. But I think her toughness is obvious now. She’s making power moves. And it’s impressive.