Federal judge slaps down Florida’s surgeon general In another smackdown for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his lackeys, a federal judge on Thursday issued a temporary restraining order against state threats to prosecute TV stations that run ads in support of Florida’s abortion-rights amendment: The temporary restraining order addresses a lawsuit filed against the state by Floridians Protecting Freedom, a group campaigning for Amendment 4, which will appear on the Nov. 5 ballot. This order expires Oct. 29, when a hearing on the lawsuit is scheduled. Chief U.S. District Judge Mark E. Walker’s sharply worded ruling prevents the department from “taking any further actions to coerce, threaten, or intimate repercussions” against broadcasters for airing the ads or “undertaking enforcement action” against them. In citing one case used in his ruling, he offered a brief summary: “To keep it simple for the State of Florida: it’s the First Amendment, stupid.” “Political advertisement is political speech — speech at the core of the First Amendment.
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Apparently, most Americans think so In September of 2020, 200,000 Americans had just died of COVID. There was no vaccine, unemployment was at 8%. The whole world had just been shut down and was only slowly coming back to life. Donald Trump was pushing snake oil cures and pretending the whole thing wasn’t much of a problem. And yet 55 percent of Americans believed they were better off than they’d been four years ago. And only 39 percent believe that now. WTF?
Or is it Dumptyism? Trumptyism? The former Republican Party (now the Party of Trump) sold itself for decades as opponents of the Soviet empire and insistent on upholding law and order. LAW! ORDER! As I’ve said of other professed “values” from that team, those boasts were always a mile wide and an inch deep. The people who for decades of accused the left of being squishy on morality have taken squishy to a new level. Helpfully, Jonathan Chait offers a kind of phrasebook for interpreting “law and order” as Donald Trump understands it (Intelligencer): One of the most important and consistent facets of Donald Trump’s thinking is that the law, as most people understand it, is conceptually meaningless. Legal activity, as he understands the term, means anything done by or on behalf of Donald Trump (this can include tax fraud, stealing and refusing to give back classified documents, assaulting police officers in an attempt to overturn an election, or other clear violations of federal criminal statutes).
We have officially entered the manic stage of the presidential election in which the candidates are suddenly everywhere. At least Kamala Harris is everywhere. She’s holding huge raucous rallies all over the swing states, appearing on podcasts and mainstream interviews even going on Fox and subjecting herself to a barrage of hostile Trump inspired accusations from anchor Brett Baier who didn’t seem to want her to actually answer them. (She showed she cannot be intimidated which was probably the point of the interview in the first place.) Nobody at this point should complain that she isn’t being available to the public. Just turn on your TV and you’ll see her there. Trump, on the other hand, is as present as always by holding looney rallies and post on crazy comments on Truth Social, but is refusing to debate Harris again and has cancelled numerous scheduled interviews this week. Yet he’s holding events in California and New York which aren’t even on the radar.
I think we all need a little bit of the chillest animal on th earth right now: I want one.
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.
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.