More bad news for Team Trump Okay, I’m just now getting to Ezra Klein’s podcast with Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota. Listen to this guy. He’s sound. I’ll finish after this posts. Meantime, Walz’s opponent for vice president, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, continues to have his woes: Several polls have indicated that Vance has overwhelmingly underperformed among American voters, making him the least popular nonincumbent veep candidate since 1980. Vance’s popularity has sunk by 8.8 percentage points since his vice presidential candidacy was announced at the Republican National Convention, according to a polling average aggregated by FiveThirtyEight. One poll conducted by Public Policy Polling on July 31 found that 47 percent of polled Americans found Vance to be unfavorable, while just 30 percent considered him favorable. An ABC News-Ipsos poll conducted between July 20 and July 27 found that Vance’s favorability had dropped by nine points, and an AP-NORC poll conducted between July 15 and July 29 saw Vance’s favorably drop by eight points. <sad trombone> Okay, don’t get cocky. Get busy.
Reading
Jodie Whittaker (Thirteenth Doctor) and Mandip Gill (Yaz) on returning for Big Finish's new Doctor Who audio dramas - including a few clues.
Trump’s nightmare becomes a night terror Ebullient. Is that the right word? Since President Biden passed his party’s baton to Vice President Kamala Harris, the mood among Democratic Party faithful has turned a sharp corner. The energy at rallies for the Harris campaign, now complete with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, is the stuff of former president Donald Trump’s reality-challenged boasts. And a nightmare for an old con man desperate for the presidential shield to shield him from jail time. (Trump made bank off his glowering mugshot. Wonder what his glower will look like after a prison haircut?) Ed Kilgore reviews a few post Biden polls for the New York Magazine Intelligencer. Trump’s nightmare is headed into night terror territory. The Harris polling bounce is now a trend: According to the FiveThirtyEight national polling averages, Harris is leading Trump by 1.9 percent (45.3 to 43.4 percent), with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at 5.3 percent. When Biden dropped out, he was trailing in the same averages by 3.2 percent.
There’s a dreamy and appealing naturalism to Alan Felsenthal’s elegy, Hereafter. The poems are electric and vivid, but the book never romanticizes suffering. Voices in these poems have a sadness to them, a melancholy that retains some almost mystical buoyancy. But never treacly. Or maybe it’s just that this mourning is still tempered by a hard sweetness, the sweetness of a friendship that doesn’t end even though one friend has passed on. Here’s how “Cover Letter” begins:
just say my subject is grief
it comes as a strike
leaves stricken
like an aircraft
afflicted
as Jupiter is
in opposition to Mars
and a few lines later, ends:
I can keep this up
as long
as death
a book
unreadable from this distance
go try anyway
the rain heaves
something is not shut
the library downstairs only goes to S
Recent reports reveal Iron Dome's malfunctioning missiles causing civilian casualties and infrastructure damage, exposing the flaws in Israel's touted defense system.
The post Myth of The Iron Dome: The Costly Lie Behind Israel’s ‘Impenetrable’ Defense appeared first on MintPress News.
AIPAC’s relentless funding and smear campaigns lead to the defeat of progressive icon Cori Bush, raising serious concerns about the integrity of U.S. elections.
The post AIPAC Strikes Again: Cori Bush’s Primary Loss Exposes the Power of Pro-Israel Money appeared first on MintPress News.
“America now has a choice between the former president’s nightmarish vision of national decline that only a strongman can fix and Harris’ optimistic vow that America is still a land of aspiration. But that dichotomy also points to a huge risk for Harris. Running a campaign rooted in hopefulness and good cheer at a time when many Americans feel demoralized and tired could backfire.” — CNN
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Look, I get it. Emperor Palpatine is dead, again, and the First Order has scattered to rural Outer Rim diners to lick its turbolaser wounds over heavy mugs of blue drink. The new new hope is ascending in our galaxy far, far away, and that’s a great thing.
But is it really?
I mean, sure, we mustn’t forget the billions of voices who screamed out and were silenced as literal planets disintegrated before our very eyes, but this hope message everyone’s jazzed about… I can’t be the only one thinking it’s a bit of a risk, right?
Sharmine Narwani shares her insights on the targeted killings of Fuad Shukr and Ismail Haniyeh, which have sent shockwaves through the Middle East and raised the specter of a broader regional conflict.
The post Israel’s Short-sighted Political Assassinations with Sharmine Narwani appeared first on MintPress News.
The story of how the Conservatives exempted their media supporters from laws against spreading dangerously false information online
Robinson has been blamed for stoking the unrest, but the tentacles of disinformation are global. Nafeez Ahmed uncovers a worrying nexus of tech platforms and far-right conspiracy – with links to Europe, Russia and the January 6 insurrection
- by Aeon Video
- by Eli Friedlander
- by Deepak P
The promise of social mobility is broken for many people. This makes it tempting to blame meritocracy, claiming that the ideal merely serves to uphold an unjust system. But if taken seriously, this remedy would have disastrous effects. A world in which top positions are not even supposed to go to the most deserving would […]
The politics of anti-Muslim and anti-migrant hatred pushed by the Reform leader and his supporters has been tolerated for far too long
Kamala Harris' choice of running mate has been praised as a 'top of the leader-board pick'
“This appears to be a clear attempt to stifle both journalistic activities and pro-Palestine speech.”
The post The Outrageous Case of a Journalist Charged With a Hate Crime for Recording a Gaza Protest Action appeared first on The Intercept.
The financial markets around the world have over the last week demonstrated, once again, that they are subject to wild swings in irrationality despite mainstream economists holding out the idea that these sorts of transactions exhibit pure rationality. Some of the capital movements are explained by a shift in the interest rate spread between Japan…
If I were an American, I’d be pretty happy about the guy, unless I have a problem with mass murder of foreigners.
Before Tim Walz became a politician, he was a high school teacher. One of his passions as a teacher was the subject of the Holocaust. Walz wrote his masters’ thesis on “Improving Human Rights and Genocide Studies in the American High School Classroom.” It argued that the way we teach the Holocaust and genocide in school was mistaken. Walz pushed for an approach that didn’t separate the Holocaust from other genocides and human rights abuses. He also insisted that it was a mistake to focus on the maniacal character of Hitler and the Nazis. Instead he argued for a more integrated, comparative, and historicist approach, incorporating factors such as colonialism, economics, and civil war, and connecting the Holocaust to the […]
I have a letter in The Chronicle of Higher Education responding to Steven Teles’ call for more conservative college professors. It’s a shortened version of a longer piece I wrote, which I’m posting here. The fact that conservatives are thin in the humanities and social sciences departments of US college campuses is well known. A […]
