WTFness at the NYT The spouse’s sharp eyes picked out a detail in a New York Times account of Ukraine’s surprise counterattack last week that sent its forces over the border into Russia: Ukrainian troops sliced easily through a thinly defended border, pushing tens of miles into Russia and shifting the narrative of the war after a glum year in which Ukraine had struggled, often in vain, to hold back Russian advances across its eastern front. By Monday, Ukraine’s commanding general had told President Volodymyr Zelensky that his troops held 390 square miles of territory in Russia’s southeastern Kursk region. Two dozen settlements were overrun. You take some of our land, Vlad? Fine, we’ll take some of yours. But that account from Monday is not what raised the wife’s ire. It was the story in Tuesday’s The Morning briefing by German Lopez on what Ukraine hoped to gain from the incursion: to “divert Russian troops from strategic locations,” to improve Ukrainian morale, to impress Washington, and “to shore up support abroad“: Kyiv has relied on aid from Western nations to defend itself.
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And following up yesterday’s producer inflation report, here’s the consumer report:
I know you know that, but this is one of the stupidest things he’s ever said “The biggest threat is not global warming, where the ocean’s going to rise one, one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years. The big — and you’ll have more oceanfront property, right?” Donald Trump Trump said that speaking to Elon Musk in his X “interview” the other day. Philip Bump breaks it down: Trump often dismisses the threat posed by rising sea levels by suggesting that they are minor or insignificant. Speaking to Musk, it was an eighth of an inch over 400 years; how could anyone be worried about that? But that is nonsense. “Global mean sea level increased by 0.20 (0.15 to 0.25) m between 1901 and 2018,” the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change wrote last year. “The average rate of sea level rise was 1.3 (0.6 to 2.1) mm yr between 1901 and 1971, increasing to 1.9 (0.8 to 2.9) mm yr between 1971 and 2006, and further increasing to 3.7 (3.2 to 4.2) mm yr between 2006 and 2018 (high confidence).” Putting that in American, sea levels rose nearly eight inches from 1901 to 2018.
The gravedigger of democracy has concerns The master manipulator who put his thumb on the scales to take advantage of the undemocratic electoral college (which results in a GOP advantage even when they are rejected by a majority of the voters) to install two hyper-partisan wingnut Supreme Court justices says that if the Democrats win they’re going to right his wrongs. Boo fucking hoo: The day after Minnesota Governor Tim Walz was announced as Kamala Harris’s choice for vice president, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told a crowd of lawmakers in Louisville, Kentucky, that a Harris administration would spell certain doom for the Republican Party. “Let’s assume our worst nightmare—the Democrats went to the White House, the House, the Senate,” McConnell said during his keynote speech at the National Conference of State Legislators Legislative Summit last week, according to Spectrum News. “The first thing they’ll do is get rid of the [Senate] filibuster. Second, you’ll have two new states: D.C., Puerto Rico.
Corporate capitalism too Sociologist Jessica Calarco (“Holding it Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net“) believes that one reason we cannot have nice things, The Ink explains, is “because Americans have been sold a manufactured ideology of personal responsibility, bolstered by the work of neoliberal economists, and for the most part accept it as tradition — even though it’s largely an invention of 20th-century business interests and crafted as part of the backlash to the New Deal.” That system is not just propped up by cheap labor, but by women’s labors specifically: The situation persists largely because women have been forced to make up for the lack of real social policy. Whether that’s to do with a conservative vision of women’s roles being as homemakers, helpmeets, and mothers or our reliance on poor women, women of color, and immigrant (and undocumented immigrant women) to fill the low-paid jobs in child and elder care that make American society possible, it’s women who do the devalued and relentlessly taxing work that can’t be made profitable in the market.
Remember the 10 year old girl who had to travel to Indiana for an abortion? And they tried to prosecute the doctor who helped her? Well: Indiana’s attorney general has dropped a lawsuit that accused the state’s largest hospital system of violating patient privacy laws when a doctor told a newspaper that a 10-year-old Ohio girl had traveled to Indiana for an abortion. A federal judge last week approved Attorney General Todd Rokita’s request to dismiss his lawsuit, which the Republican had filed last year against Indiana University Health and IU Healthcare Associates, The Indianapolis Star reported. The suit accused the hospital system of violating HIPAA, the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, and a state law, for not protecting patient information in the case of a 10-year-old rape victim who traveled to Indiana to receive abortion drugs. Dr. Caitlin Bernard ‘s attorneys later that she shared no personally identifiable information about the girl, and no such details were reported in the Star’s story on July 1, 2022, but it became a flashpoint in the abortion debate days after the U.S.
Yet another moment from the X horror: Donald Trump has apparently considered the possibility that he might lose the 2024 election—and, if he does, his plans for the future involve a one-way ticket to Venezuela. Speaking to Elon Musk on Monday, the former president told the X owner, “If something happens with this election, which would be a horror show, we’ll meet the next time in Venezuela, because it’ll be a far safer place to meet than our country. So you and I will go and we’ll have a meeting and dinner in Venezuela.” “Their crime rate is coming down and our crime rate is going through the roof,” Trump continued. “And it’s so simple. And you haven’t seen anything yet, because these people have come into our country and they’re just getting acclimated.” He added that Venezuela has cleared out “about 70% of their really bad people,” suggesting that said “really bad people” are now in the US. “Their jails are about 50%, put into the United States,” he said. “Same with other countries, over 30%. Some are at 50%.
There are some intriguing polls about Florida the past few days. I’m not suggesting that it’s in play. But it’s certainly not as red as it has been. Vice President Kamala Harris has erased half of former President Donald Trump’s lead in Florida, a statewide poll released Wednesday found. The Florida Atlantic University poll shows Trump leading Harris 50% to 47% among likely voters in the state. Just 2% said they were undecided and 1% said they’d vote for another candidate. The 3-point Trump advantage is half the lead he had in June, the last time FAU polled in the state. Trump had a 6-point advantage among likely voters, 49% to 43%, when President Joe Biden was the Democratic candidate two months ago. The execrable Ric Scott is only up by 4 points and Miami Harris is actually up in Miami. The execrable Ric Scott is only ahead by 4 points. The terrific Bolts.com has a fascinating story today about one of the prosecutors DeSantis suspended a couple of years ago because he was using prosecutorial discretion that DeSantis didn’t care for: Andrew Warren is running to win back his old job as Tampa’s top prosecutor.
Pat Carta, an extraordinary organizer with Local 34 and one of the great leaders of the unions at Yale, has died. I worked closely with Pat between 1993 and 1996. She trained me as an organizer, and though I don’t think she ever realized this, she felt like family to me. In fact, she reminded me a great deal of my family, particularly my mom. She was tough, warm, smart, loving, difficult, charismatic, powerful, relentless, demanding, honest, fearless. I always wished I could tell her what she meant to me, but she wasn’t someone who invited that kind of disclosure. Unless you said it from afar. As I’m doing now. Though it’s been nearly 30 years now, two things about […]
A little fun for a Monday evening… Oh how the wingnuts hate him.