There are two huge elections taking place in Europe right now, one in the UK and one in France. Most of you no doubt understand that various electoral systems but it is rather complicated, especially in France, so in case you have some questions I thought I’d direct you to an excellent guide by Daniel Nichanian at Bolts.com. Here’s the intro: Two major elections are taking place this week, within days of one another. The United Kingdom votes on Thursday to elect its members of parliament for the first time since 2019. France then heads to the polls on Sunday for runoffs that will decide the make-up of its National Assembly. The timing of both elections are major surprises. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called them in late May, while French President Emmanuel Macron shocked his country on June 9 by announcing that he was dissolving the National Assembly and organizing elections within a month. Each election will decide who governs the country, using rules that often differ from U.S. norms.
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(Unless this country gets it shit together) I’m not looking forward to the Harris slut-shame fest that may be coming. But he clearly won’t be able to help himself.
Oy vey. Just what we need, right? Axios has been one of the most hysterical of all media outlets over Joe Biden’s debate debacle so I’m loathe to put much stock in their gossip reporting. However, this is actually informative: If President Biden steps aside, Vice President Harris would be almost impossible to beat for the nomination, thanks to endorsements, money, optics and 2028 politics, top officials tell us. All Harris needs is Biden’s backing. If she gets it, the Obamas and Clintons likely would follow, making any challenge an affront to the sitting president and two former presidents. If she gets Biden’s endorsement, the only way a top-tier Democrat could challenge her would be to risk their future by saying “not your turn” to the first woman vice president, first Black American vice president and first South Asian vice president. Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), who chaired the House Jan.
You thought we’d put this behind us? A reliable feature of our politics is that people from the center to the left, including the press, direct more fire at Democrats than at Republicans. It’s not that Democrats deserve more criticism. It’s that the aggrieved see more chance that their complaints will leave a mark on the left than on conservatives better armored against them. If shamelessness is conservatives’ superpower, giving a damn is the left’s kryptonite. Protecting our freedoms matters. Improving other people’s lives matters. A more perfect union matters. Equal justice under law matters. Just not to our opponents, if ever it was. Joe Biden’s terrible debate performance bleeds, so it leads. The media feeding frenzy is dispiriting in the extreme. Some Democrats tearing out their hair in panic and others circling the wagons around Biden makes quite a messy show. Pixels and ink, eyeballs and clicks.
Pro-Publica released its full unedited interview with Joe Biden from September: In the wake of President Joe Biden’s poor debate performance, his opponents and most major media organizations have pointed out that he has done few interviews that give the public an opportunity to hear him speak without a script or teleprompters. Defend the facts. Support independent journalism by donating to ProPublica.Donate Now So much has been made of this limited access that the impressions from Special Counsel Robert K. Hur about his five hours of interviews with the president on Oct. 8 and 9 drove months of coverage. The prosecutor said Biden had “diminished faculties in advancing age” and called him a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Biden angrily dismissed these assertions, which Vice President Kamala Harris called “politically motivated.” House Republicans on Monday sued Attorney General Merrick B. Garland for audio recordings of the interview as the White House asserts executive privilege to deny their release. ProPublica obtained a rare interview with Biden on Sept.
They are applying “the cackle” to Kamala Harris already. It was a common description of Hillary Clinton. And it wasn’t Republicans who came up with it. From 2008: This just in: Hillary Clinton has been laughing a lot lately. Yes, it’s true — a candidate long accused of being cold and unappealing has taken to emitting a hearty chuckle in public, and on the airwaves. We hope you were sitting down for that one. Actually, in this highly-monitored campaign, the decisions of its most-disciplined and most-focus-grouped candidate are news, and the Hillary Laugh Tactic has been noticeable. Jon Stewart picked up on it in earlier this week, splicing laugh segments together (in a way that, let’s be honest, would make anyone appear manic), but it certainly set up the punchline: Jon fixing the camera with an intense, humorless gaze and saying “I’M JOYFUL.” Frank Rich noted it too: “Now Mrs. Clinton is erupting in a laugh with all the spontaneity of an alarm clock buzzer.” And then, of course, there was The Cackle.
Biden must go? And then what? Will Bunch observes: Over the course of a remarkable weekend, I saw the best minds of my boomer generation destroyed by madness — newspaper columnists and other big shots convinced they were cosplayers in a real-world episode of The West Wing, saving America by giving chief of staff Leo McGarry the best words to convince an ailing President Bartlet that it’s time to step down. Democrats, many of them, are panicked over President Joe Biden’s debate performance on Thursday. This is one time Democrats really do seem in disarray. The press is having a field day, of course. But reporters are wary enough of being blamed for holding the drum while the “Biden must go” team beats it that Brian Stelter tells CNN it is no longer us (the press) but Democratic officials turning against Biden. In the grocery store, online, on listservs, and in calls, “Biden can’t win” blares self-fulfilling prophecy in spite of the fact that, at least in the polls, there is no Biden free fall. One in three Democrats believes Biden should leave the presidential race, a Reuters/Ipsos poll that concluded Tuesday finds.
MAGA hates you. They really hate you. Maybe the problem with getting people to understand the threat posed by Donald Trump, by MAGA, and by Project 2025 is that it has no face. In the wake of the Supreme Court making the president a de facto king, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts just gave it one. Yes, the “radical left” is the enemy MAGA will defeat “in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” And if we resist? The Biden-Harris campaign put a short clip on social media. Brian Beutler, responds, “Incredible to me that this stuff only surfaces because the Biden campaign and media watchdog types tweet it out. To the extent it figures into campaign coverage at all (even pre-debate) it’s just ho-hum, in passing, nbd, etc.” Actress Taraji P. Henson made a plea for paying attention during the BET Awards on Sunday. “The Project 2025 plan is not a game. Look it up!” No, it’s not a game, confirms Nicole Wallace.
In 1973 the Senate Watergate Committee uncovered a plan that had been hatched three years earlier by a man named Tom Charles Huston, a White House liaison to the Interagency Committee on Intelligence (ICI), a group chaired FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to monitor “left wing radicals.” The Huston Plan, as it was known, laid out detailed operations to burglarize the homes and conduct electronic surveillance of these co-called radicals and even detain anti-war protesters in camps to be created in western states. President Richard Nixon signed off on the plan only to rescind his approval a few days later under objections from Hoover himself. It was one of a number of nefarious plots uncovered during the investigations, including the actual burglarizing of Pentagon Papers whistle blower Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, an order to bomb the Brooking s Institute and the Watergate burglary itself. The Huston Plan was one that was never carried out but went directly to the president who signed the order.
Media Matters has this: Right-wing commentators are praising former President Donald Trump for managing to “keep his mouth shut” and “remaining completely silent” after President Joe Biden’s June 27 debate performance, which triggered widespread concern about Biden’s fitness for office and ability to win reelection. “Donald Trump has run the most disciplined campaign, maybe, over the last 25 years,” Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade said on July 3. “The fact that he is laying out during this whole news cycle shows a discipline at a whole new level.” That strategically silent, disciplined Trump does not exist. Since the debate, the former president and presumptive Republican presidential nominee has repeatedly promoted calls from his supporters to jail his perceived political enemies for “treason” and other purported crimes. On Sunday, Trump “ReTruthed” a post calling for former Rep.