Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 26 2024
by Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
[Democracy Journal. Spring 2024, No. 72]
Reading
He’s the main reason masking turned into a political issue. He didn’t want to mess up his make-up and people died. He just has to lie…
So you think polling skepticism is a fool’s errand? Maybe. But it does pay to remember our most recent election in 2022. Here’s the opening of the NY Times recap of what happened (gift link): Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat, had consistently won re-election by healthy margins in her three decades representing Washington State. This year seemed no different: By midsummer, polls showed her cruising to victory over a Republican newcomer, Tiffany Smiley, by as much as 20 percentage points. So when a survey in late September by the Republican-leaning Trafalgar Group showed Ms. Murray clinging to a lead of just two points, it seemed like an aberration. But in October, two more Republican-leaning polls put Ms. Murray barely ahead, and a third said the race was a dead heat. As the red and blue trend lines of the closely watched RealClearPolitics average for the contest drew closer together, news organizations reported that Ms. Murray was suddenly in a fight for her political survival. Warning lights flashed in Democratic war rooms. If Ms. Murray was in trouble, no Democrat was safe. Ms.
Ken Burns suspends “long-standing attempt at neutrality” This clip is a week old, but it’s flying around the internet this weekend. Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns addressed graduates at Brandeis University and warned about the threat to America’s “fragile, 249-year-old experiment.” On our “existential crossroads”: Burns cites Lincoln’s Lyceum speech (Springfield, Illinois, January 27, 1838) on “the perpetuation of our political institutions.” Lincoln was 28: At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide. Lincoln continued: I hope I am over wary; but if I am not, there is, even now, something of ill-omen, amongst us. I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; Burns’s point was that while history never repeats, it sometimes rhymes. And the rhymes are unmistakeable now. The speech in its entirety is here and worth your time.
In Doctor Who, we're never told why the old woman in "73 Yards" is terrifying, but we have a theory involving the mystery of Cosmic Horror.
Military contractors are scamming the government and shooting down accountability efforts, and other news from The Lever this week.
Is this what the “pro-life” movement wanted?
The post Sterilization, Murders, Suicides: Bans Haven’t Slowed Abortions, and They’re Costing Lives appeared first on The Intercept.
Taking pandering to new lows First, big props to Dave Weigel (now with Semafor) for covering the messiest. most tedious parts of political conventions for years. How he can stand to live-blog Democratic platform committee meetings is beyond me. This weekend, Dave is covering the Libertarian Party’s national convention in Washington, D.C. Weigel reports: Donald Trump promised members of the Libertarian Party that he would “put a libertarian in my cabinet” and commute the life sentence of Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, a top demand of a political movement that intends to run its own candidate against him. “On day one, we will commute the sentence,” Trump said, offering to free the creator of what was once the internet’s most infamous drug clearinghouse. “We will bring him home.” His speeches more typically include a pledge to execute drug dealers, citing China as a model. As anyone might have guessed from the motion made from the floor on Friday that “Donald Trump to go f*ck himself” that drew applause, Trump’s reception was not his warmest.
South Africa heads to the polls on 29 May amid predictions that the African National Congress could lose its majority for the first time
In today's BCTV Daily Dispatch: TMNT, Smiling Friends, Doctor Who, Lanterns, The Boys, X-Men '97, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, and much more!
‘So we are taught social justice and all that in the classrooms, but we’re supposed to put them away in the real world?’ The UCLA student who recently asked this question was, moments later, attacked by pro-war mobs who had just been allowed by the police to enter the university campus. Their experience is one […]
Intro In the midst of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic—one that begat many a mommy thinkpiece, many a motherhood memoir, almost all of which decried and…
Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
Sam: If I take one more step, I’ll be the farthest away from home I’ve ever been. Frodo: Come on, Sam. Remember what Bilbo used to say: “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door.” — from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring Well… things have certainly “opened up” again: A record was broken ahead of the Memorial Day weekend for the number of airline travelers screened at U.S. airports, the Transportation Security Administration said Saturday. More than 2.9 million travelers were screened at U.S. airports on Friday, surpassing a previous record set last year on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, according to the transportation security agency. “Officers have set a new record for most travelers screened in a single day!” the TSA tweeted. “We recommend arriving early.” The third busiest day on record was set on Thursday when just under 2.9 million travelers were screened at U.S. airports. In Atlanta, the world’s busiest airport had its busiest day ever.
Heading into this weekend's new episode, Doctor Who Showrunner Russell T. Davies confirmed that filming on Season 2 has wrapped.
Shortly after the trailer release, The Official Doctor Who Podcast and the show's social media account shared new looks at "Dot and Bubble."
Media Matters has issued an important report on how they are already planning to contest the election: It was clear just a few months after Trump’s seditious plot to subvert the 2020 presidential election concluded with a violent mob of his supporters storming the U.S. Capitol that the right-wing propaganda apparatus was laying the groundwork to try again in 2024. Fox News and the rest of the MAGA media, which spent the weeks after the 2020 election fabricating and amplifying a host of election fraud lies and conspiracy theories to undermine the results, had begun working to institutionalize Trump’s lie that the 2020 election had been stolen from him and to construct an alternative path to the presidency in which compliant party officials would secure a Republican victory by any means necessary. Fox had become a loaded gun aimed at American democracy. Three years later, the bullet is in the chamber. The disinformation ecosystem which revolves around Fox is telegraphing a plan to reject the results of the 2024 election if Trump loses.
The Bulwark’s resident curmudgeon JV Last offers up a disturbing thought that has certainly been crossing my mind a lot these days. He asks, “what if Trump is right about America?” meaning what if Trump just understands American’s better than the rest of us? He points to these things Trump has been right about: (1) Republican voters. For 40 years it was dogma that Republican voters wanted a president who blended social and fiscal conservatism and waited his turn to run. In 2016, Trump understood that Republican voters no longer wanted any of those things. They wanted the craziest son-of-a-bitch available. (2) The Republican party. The GOP looked like a formidable, disciplined gatekeeper. Trump understood that it was weak and would go along with whatever a man of pure will demanded of it. (3) The Conservative movement. For three generations conservatives pretended that they cared about policy ideas, such as restrained spending, small government, free trade, and robust foreign policy.
After the “butter emails” debacle you don’t really need this but if you want another example of how editorial choices about what to cover in politics can actually lead to a lack of understanding, here’s a good one: The wife of Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. told a Washington Post reporter in January 2021 that an upside-down American flag recently flown on their flagpole was “an international signal of distress” and indicated that it had been raised in response to a neighborhood dispute. Martha-Ann Alito made the comments when the reporter went to the couple’s Fairfax County, Va., home to follow up on a tip about the flag, which was no longer flying when he arrived… The Post decided not to report on the episode at the time because the flag-raising appeared to be the work of Martha-Ann Alito, rather than the justice, and connected to a dispute with her neighbors, a Post spokeswoman said. It was not clear then that the argument was rooted in politics, the spokeswoman said.
Each time money is used, an epistemology, a metaphysics, a politics, an ethics, and even a theology is evoked. Money condenses the spirit of capitalism. Money did not create capitalism—the early factories and mills were rarely funded by bank loans—yet money transmits, propagates, and vivifies it. This thought-provoking quotation (p. 20) is from Theology of […]