They’ll never stop trying Of course: Three of Donald Trump’s rivals for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination are pushing for cuts to Social Security benefits that would only affect younger Americans, as the party’s leaders grapple with the explosive politics of the retirement program. In comments on Sunday as well as in interviews earlier this year, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said Social Security will need to be revamped — but not for people who are near or in retirement. Former vice president Mike Pence and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley have taken similar positions since launching their presidential campaigns. From the earliest days of his 2016 run, Trump has vowed not to touch either Social Security or Medicare — a break from GOP orthodoxy that has shifted the party’s views — and has more recently hammered DeSantis for wanting to cut the program. It’s in the DNA of the Republican Party to end the safety net. It just is. Trump may have temporarily taken it off the table but it will be right back on the minute he leaves the scene. I have never believed for a minute that this was a permanent change of ideology.
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Meadows was in the thick of everything in Trump’s last year in office from the COVID mess to the Big Lie and he’s been MIA in the media since it was over. He wrote his book, which was full of some colorful details that made Trump angry and he provided a lot of emails to the January 6th Committee before clamming up. But nobody knows to what extent he’s been cooperating with the Special Counsel, not even Trump. According to reports Trumpworld is very nervous about that. According to the Washington Post, the Special Counsel is interested in him but it doesn’t sound to me as if he’s cooperating: Mark Meadows joked about the baseless claim that large numbers of votes were fraudulently cast in the names of dead people in the days before the then-White House chief of staff participated in a phone call in which then-President Trump alleged there were close to 5,000dead voters in Georgia and urged Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to overturn the 2020 election there.
Draw your own conclusions Anne Applebaum responds (h/t Laffy) to the Russian missile attack overnight on the Ukrainian port city of Odessa: “I believed Russia would not destroy historic Odesa, because of the city’s significance to the Russian empire. But I was wrong – now it seems they know they will never control it again, so they are happy to see it burn.” “Russian missiles badly damaged a historic Orthodox cathedral in the southern Ukrainian port city of Odesa, sparking outrage and prompting President Zelensky to vow retaliation,” CNN reports: Odesa is a key cultural center, and has long links with Russia. It was founded under Catherine the Great and was once Russia’s second most important port. Euromaidan Press: During the night of 23 July, Russia launched five types of missiles at the south-Ukrainian port city of Odesa, destroying port infrastructure, residential buildings, and the largest Orthodox Church in the city, Operative Command South said.
In this Doctor Who multimedia event update, Doom's (Sooz Kempner) Day is already off to a rough start, and there are still 19 hours to go.
Why small is still beautiful Tripp Narup ran for and lost a state senate seat in red, red Iowa. As a Democrat. Because the last time he’d voted in Iowa’s 9th district there was no one for him to vote for. Narup tells Salon’s Kirk Swearingen that only 17% of voters are registered Democrats in that southwest Iowa district. He tells Salon: After losing spectacularly for the Senate, I have now started a PAC to raise money to support (as yet undetermined) candidates to run for four [state] House seats and one open Senate seat. The plan is to raise $2,000 per candidate as an enticement to get someone to step up and run. Any additional money will be used to run ads pointing out the many sins of our current state senators representatives. Now this may strike you as small potatoes (these are farming districts, after all), but my whole campaign cost less than $6,000 and I paid for a third of it. “Big campaign money” around here is $10,000 or so. (In farm terms, that’s about 7 cows.) Compared to big-city politics, this is quaint and kind of endearing.
Americans might want a third party, but the latest attempt from No Labels offers more of the same corporate politics with even more billionaire control.
That logic should have been thus successful is an advantage which it owes entirely to its limitations, whereby it is justified in abstracting — indeed, it is under obligation to do so — from all objects of knowledge and their differences, leaving the understanding nothing to deal with save itself and its form. But for […]
Different ways of paying for drug development could generate more drugs that we desperately need more cheaply.
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“The atomic bomb made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country.” -J. Robert Oppenheimer [Shame mode] All the times I’ve zipped by the I-82 turn-off to Richland, Washington while driving on I-90 and thought “hey, isn’t that where that Hanford superfund nuclear thingy is?” I’ve never stopped to ponder its historical significance. Adjacent to the Hanford Nuclear Site that was built in the early 1940s to house nuclear government workers at the height of the Manhattan Project, Richland is, in essence, a company town; a true “atomic city” with a problematic legacy. Then again, according to Irene Lusztig’s absorbing documentary Richland (which I caught at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival), how “problematic” depends on who you talk to. Many current residents don’t see why anyone would fuss over the local high school football team’s “mascot”, which is …a mushroom cloud.
Especially when it comes to migrant workers I’m sure you’ve seen the horrific pictures of that cruel, spiked buoy barrier Texas Gov. Greg Abbot has unfurled in the middle of the Rio Grande. Luckily, the feds have decided to take action: One of the more pernicious developments in our politics is the effort by red-stategovernors to assert outsize power over immigration in their states, in ways designed to appeal to national right-wing audiences. For instance, the state of Texas recently placed a large barrier in the Rio Grande, supposedly to keep migrants out, but actually justto send a message to Fox News viewers that the state is securing the border where President Biden allegedly refused. But now the Justice Department has sent a letter to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott notifying him that the department will sue the state over the barrier if Texas does not commit to removing it by Monday afternoon.
The public isn’t seeing this … yet. But there are 16 months to the election. It may start to sink in with some of them: Morgan Stanley is crediting President Joe Biden’s economic policies with driving an unexpected surge in the U.S. economy that is so significant that the bank was forced to make a “sizable upward revision” to its estimates for U.S. gross domestic product. Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is “driving a boom in large-scale infrastructure,” wrote Ellen Zentner, chief U.S. economist for Morgan Stanley, in a research note released Thursday. In addition to infrastructure, “manufacturing construction has shown broad strength,” she wrote. As a result of these unexpected swells, Morgan Stanley now projects 1.9% GDP growth for the first half of this year. That’s nearly four times higher than the bank’s previous forecast of 0.5%. “The economy in the first half of the year is growing much stronger than we had anticipated, putting a more comfortable cushion under our long-held soft landing view,” Zentner wrote.
YOUTH Leading The World Coffs Harbour, an OzGREEN program, convened its 2023 congress at The Link, Toormina, on Wednesday 12 and Thursday 13 July, with delegates aged 12-25 years. Hosted by co-founder of OzGREEN, Sue Lennox AM, who founded YLTW, the two-day event connects young people locally and globally to help mobilise the next generation...
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HISTORIC traditions will be celebrated at Timberfest next Saturday, 29 July, as the small village of Glenreagh opens its recreation grounds for one of the region’s most-popular community festivals. A first this year is the steam engine ‘whistle off’ with some traction engine vehicles moving around the festival area. Advertise with News of The Area...
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PETBARN Coffs Harbour is leading the fundraising tally board in the 10th annual Petbarn Foundation and Vision Australia Seeing Eye Dogs appeal. “The Coffs Coast area stands out in their dedication to supporting people who are blind or have low vision,” Janelle Bloxom, Petbarn Foundation manager, who lives in Coffs Harbour, told News Of The...
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SALTWATER Freshwater Arts Alliance Aboriginal Corporation has been granted $2.186 million funding to support the acquisition of their own premises, located in a prime position within the central business district of Coffs Harbour. It’s been a project two years in the making. Advertise with News of The Area today. It’s worth it for your business....
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Gosh, I wonder why? Who could have guessed that would happen? Republican voters with a college degree and a built-in skepticism of Donald Trump were supposed to form the backbone of Ron DeSantis’ strategy to win the 2024 GOP presidential primary. Instead, they’re leaving his campaign in droves. A trio of Republican primary polls, including previously unpublished data obtained by McClatchyDC, show that Florida’s governor has suffered steep declines in support among GOP voters with at least a bachelor’s degree, an erosion that threatens to undermine his candidacy. Their defections — which started in the spring and have continued this summer — are disproportionately responsible for DeSantis’ overall decline in the race, where polls show he now sits a distant second place to Trump. In all three surveys, the governor now has barely half the support with college-educated white voters that he did when the year began, larger drop-offs than he suffered with other demographic groups.
There are over 400 fossil fuel projects each with the potential to release more than 1 Gt of CO2. Serious environmental and human rights problems associated with mining the energy transition’s essential metals. Barry Commoner described the problem and its cause 60 years ago. Carbon bombs There are 425 existing and proposed fossil fuel projects Continue reading »
Is our deepest yearning to be ‘Us’, together, on our islands of Australia? A reflection on the Voice referendum and life, after a conversation this week at a swimming pool. On Monday, changing after swimming, a bloke struck up a conversation. “I am voting ‘No’ at the Referendum”, he said. He then went into some Continue reading »
Whereas once upon a time Australia was regarded as a country of goodwill, tolerance and decency, it is now reputed, worldwide, to be the country with the most inhumane treatment towards refugees. When I moved to the U.S. in 1981 I carried the Australian flag with an immature and ignorant pride, totally oblivious to the Continue reading »
The human dynamic of subcultures was one of Anne Coombs’ preoccupations. She turned it into a skill that guided her activism and philanthropy. Both GetUp! and Rural Australians for Refugees, two of the causes for which she will be best remembered, relied for their success on mobilising people with shared values and beliefs. These movements Continue reading »