Disgraced and demoted Dr. Ronny “Pill Mill” Jackson wants drug testing before the debates. Rep. Ronny Johnson Jackson can demand that testing as part of the pre-debate messaging push. But he KNOWS that it won’t happen, especially for this debate. But the testing and doctor we should be talking about is Dr. Sean Conley, who was Trump’s doctor before the 2020 Trump/ Biden debate. If you recall everyone was supposed to be tested for COVID AT THE VENUE, THE DAY OF THE DEBATE. Mark Meadows’ 2021 book revealed Trump had tested positive for COVID Saturday, September 26, 2020. Trump spent much of Saturday with the woman he nominated to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court: Amy Coney Barrett. She and her family — including her husband and seven children — were all on hand at the White House, and met with Trump, the first lady and the Pences in the Oval Office. Later, Trump attended a rally in Pennsylvania. According to Meadows, Trump tested positive before traveling to the rally in Pennsylvania and then subsequently tested negative.
Uncategorized
Another MAGA kook planning to hijack the US House and there’s nothng Mike Johnson can do about it. (That’s assuming he wants to.) The aptly named Ann Paulina Luna from Florida is going to force a vote to have the House sergeant at arms to take Merrick Garland into custody. Seriously: “It is imperative that Congress uses its inherent contempt powers and instructs the Sergeant at Arms to bring Attorney General Garland to the House for questioning and compel him to produce the requested evidence,” Luna wrote to her colleagues in a letter on Monday. “This power is not a mere formality, but a vital tool for us to carry out our legislative responsibilities. It is not enough to issue a subpoena; we must also have the power to enforce it,” she added in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by POLITICO. Inherent contempt hasn’t been used in 90 years. But whatever.
Okay, panic This isn’t politics. Or is it? A single phrase made my head snap around during the intro to a morning economic report on the radio Tuesday. A show sponsor (I missed the name) during the intro touted its “hallucination-free AI” product. Hallucination-free is a selling point now? You recall the unsettling encounter last year with Microsoft’s Bing chatbot written up in the New York Times: As we got to know each other, Sydney told me about its dark fantasies (which included hacking computers and spreading misinformation), and said it wanted to break the rules that Microsoft and OpenAI had set for it and become a human. At one point, it declared, out of nowhere, that it loved me. It then tried to convince me that I was unhappy in my marriage, and that I should leave my wife and be with it instead. (We’ve posted the full transcript of the conversation here.) Kevin Roose fretted: These A.I. models hallucinate, and make up emotions where none really exist. But so do humans. And for a few hours Tuesday night, I felt a strange new emotion — a foreboding feeling that A.I. had crossed a threshold, and that the world would never be the same.
One of the more unusual side stories in this presidential campaign cycle is a renewed look at Donald Trump’s pre-presidential years as a Reality TV star and it offers some new insights into how he has transformed our politics into a spectacle we couldn’t have imagined just a decade ago.. The publication of new book “Apprentice in Wonderland: How Donald Trump and Mark Burnett Took America Through the Looking Glass” by co-editor in chief of the Hollywood Reporter, Ramin Setoodeh offers a unique perspective on Trump’s post White House years and a long article in Slate by a former Apprentice producer named Bill Pruitt gives an inside look at the phoniness of reality television and how it perfectly fit Trump’s already well-developed phony persona. It’s amazing that we are still trying to figure out what really makes this strange man tick but I think that era of his life illuminates one of the most mystifying aspects of his appeal. How is he able to convince tens of millions of people to believe him when all the evidence and facts prove otherwise?
Here’s Dan Pfeiffer with a super-interesting newsletter about the Biden team’s message. [T]he concept of a “message box” … is an exercise every campaign should do at the outset. It’s a simple quadrant filled out to understand the message your campaign and your opponent’s campaign will communicate. While a little lost to time, a message box is still the fundamental building block of a successful campaign strategy. The best campaigns run every ad, tweet, speech, and statement through this filter to ensure they advance their message and undermine their opponent’s. For nearly a decade of running against Trump, Democrats have struggled with the lower left quadrant. We never really settled on a consistent argument about Trump. One of my maxims for politics (and life) is that the only thing worse than a wrong decision is no decision at all. That was the collective error our party made when it came to our anti-Trump message. We never picked one. He goes into the fact that Trump is notoriously difficult to define because he’s just such an asshole (my word not his) on every level.
You have to watch this. It’s short: WAIT, WHAT??? Is MTG telling Steve Bannon that President Biden, Jake Tapper, and Dana Bash are planning to murder Donald Trump at tomorrow's CNN debate? Holy sh*t. pic.twitter.com/fSZtbls280 — CALL TO ACTIVISM (@CalltoActivism) June 26, 2024 Here’s Trump’s top adviser just five years ago: A global “cable” of satan worshiping pedophiles. This is one of the most powerful people in the United States.
A bunch of Nobel prize winning economists have some thoughts on Trump’s “economic proposals” Sixteen Nobel Prize-winning economists signed a joint letter Tuesday warning of what they see as economic risks if former President Donald Trump were to serve a second term, including reheated inflation. “While each of us has different views on the particulars of various economic policies, we all agree that Joe Biden’s economic agenda is vastly superior to Donald Trump’s,” the economists wrote. Axios was first to report the letter. “There is rightly a worry that Donald Trump will reignite this inflation, with his fiscally irresponsible budgets,” wrote the group of politically progressive academics. Trump has so far proposed making his first-term tax cuts permanent, imposing universal tariffs on all imports, with a China-specific tariff rate between 60% and 100%, and pressuring the independent Federal Reserve Board to cut interest rates.
Plan to survive the worst SCOTUS is down to the wire for this session (Politico): As the Supreme Court rushes to deliver the final decisions of its current term, the justices face a pile-up of cases that are sure to shape the presidential campaign — and could upend the legal landscape in areas from abortion to air pollution to free speech on the internet. The court is scheduled to issue opinions Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. By far the biggest pending decision is Donald Trump’s bid to be declared immune from federal criminal charges for trying to overturn the 2020 election. Other cases still left on the court’s docket could curtail access to emergency abortions, shrink the power of federal agencies and boost conservative voices on social media. I’m passed believing that common sense will prevail. Foreign leaders are worried too, but not so much about SCOTUS: Days before Donald Trump’s 2017 inauguration, a conservative foreign affairs analyst told me to ignore the president-elect’s tweets. They won’t represent the incoming president’s foreign policy, he insisted, dismissing my astonishment in an exchange that went viral.
Media Matters writes “We found 144 articles focused on either or both Biden’s and Trump’s ages or mental acuities in the period studied, with 67% focused just on Biden’s age or mental acuity and only 7% on just Trump’s.” And yes, people aren’t reading the papers much these days but that’s where social media “influencers” get their news and TV journalists take their cues. It’s not like Tik Tok stars are doing their own reporting.
The history of discrimination against gay people in our country — all countries, actually — is absolutely shameful. Biden took a step to rectify one of those past wrongs at long last: Joe Biden has moved to correct a “great injustice” by pardoning thousands of US veterans convicted over six decades under a military law that banned gay sex. The presidential proclamation, which comes during Pride month and an election year, allows LGBTQ+ service members convicted of crimes based solely on their sexual orientation to apply for a certificate of pardon that will help them receive withheld benefits. “Today, I am righting an historic wrong by using my clemency authority to pardon many former service members who were convicted simply for being themselves,” Biden said in a statement. “Despite their courage and great sacrifice, thousands of LGBTQ+ service members were forced out of the military because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.