Has there ever been a quicker descent into obscurity? There was a time when we couldn’t stop talking about Carlson but the one-time King of Wingnuttia seems to be completely irrelevant to the broader political conversation these days: For Tucker Carlson, it has to be the ultimate good-news, bad-news moment: A major publishing house has canceled a prominent political journalist’s upcoming biography of the far-right media figure. The good news, for Carlson partisans, is that the book in question — Hated by All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unravelling of the Conservative Mind, by Jason Zengerle — was likely to be a less-than-fawning look at the former Fox host’s journey from establishmentarian to conspiracy theorist. The bad news, though, is that the cancellation stems at least in part from the belief that Carlson, once the biggest name on cable, no longer has the kind of cultural footprint to warrant a pricey, complicated book by a top-shelf writer.
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Yet business leaders are falling all over themselves to support him. Meanwhile the projections from the Big Money Boyz are very rosy and the markets are roaring. Why in the hell do these people want to put that imbecile back in the White House? They are asking to kill their own golden goose. Nothing matters more to them than their personal income taxes, I guess.
The right’s decades-long plot to destroy public education and replace it with right wing Christian indoctrination is coming to fruition CNN reports on the latest assault on public education by the extreme right. They never quit. Near the edge of the Phoenix metro’s urban sprawl, surrounded by a wide expanse of saguaro-studded scrubland, Dream City Christian School is in the midst of a major expansion. The private school, which is affiliated with a local megachurch where former President Donald Trump held a campaign rally this month, recently broke ground on a new wing that will feature modern, airy classrooms and a pickleball court. It’s a sign of growth at a school that has partnered with a Trump-aligned advocacy group, and advertises to parents by vowing to fight “liberal ideology” such as “evolutionism” and “gender identification.” Just a few miles away, the public Paradise Valley Unified School District is shrinking, not expanding.
Swing voters swing, Biden delivers Trends are more important than individual polls. Since Donald Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts (with more cases pending), polling trend lines now favor Joe Biden in the 2024 presidential race. Polling immediately after Trump’s convictions was too soon to pick up the shift. Two-time Trump voters have had enough. Donald Trump is bleeding support. “My guess is right now, this is gonna be a blip,” pollster Lee Carter told Fox News’ Fox & Friends this morning. “I don’t think this is something that’s long term. Sure. Just a flesh wound. Significantly, there has been a large swing since May among independent voters toward Biden. And since they are the largest bloc of registrants in many states, independent turnout could be determinative. Simon Rosenberg tweets, “We’ve had lots of polling this year suggesting a Trump guilty conviction could weaken his coalition and cost him voters (as it should). We now have 6 national polls showing Biden gaining 2-4 pts since the conviction. Election appears to be changing, getting bluer.” The Fox poll was among registered voters.
Judges Tried To Persuade Cannon To Recuse but she refused The NY Times has a big scoop on the Mar-a-lago case (gift link from the reporters) Shortly after Judge Aileen M. Cannon drew the assignment in June 2023 to oversee former President Donald J. Trump’s classified documents case, two more experienced colleagues on the federal bench in Florida urged her to pass it up and hand it off to another jurist, according to two people briefed on the conversations. The judges who approached Judge Cannon — including the chief judge in the Southern District of Florida, Cecilia M. Altonaga — each asked her to consider whether it would be better if she were to decline the high-profile case, allowing it to go to another judge, the two people said. But Judge Cannon, who was appointed by Mr. Trump, wanted to keep the case and refused the judges’ entreaties. Her assignment raised eyebrows because she has scant trial experience and had previously shown unusual favor to Mr.
Every, single, election this happens. It’s tedious and destructive. Josh Marshall has a good piece today on the totally predictable phenomenon of Democrats running to the press to clutch pearls and wring hands over the campaign they think should be doing something different than they are. He notes this Axios piece that “presents a picture of a campaign cocooned from outside input, intolerant of dissenters who aren’t confident of a win and largely the work of Biden and top advisor Mike Donilon, who is portrayed as having a strategy that is little more than a preciously naive hope that in the end voters will “do the right thing.” So typical. Marshall writes: But the heart of the piece comes at the top with a quote (emphasis added) from someone described as a “Democratic strategist in touch with the campaign.” I spend a lot of time trying to avoid the twin perils of wallowing pessimism and empty optimism. But when I read this, I at first literally checked to see whether I had done a search of my email that had served up an Axios newsletter from last January.
Generally, I don’t tear up every time I hear news of an actor’s passing. But this is one of those times: Never daunted by a role, good, bad or ugly. Sounds about right. He was fearless, alright. And what a resume…where do you even start? Donald McNichol Sutherland was born in Saint John, Newfoundland/Labrador on July 17, 1935. I’ll admit that on occasion, I have completely forgotten that he was Canadian-born. But Sutherland himself certainly never forgot about his roots. From today’s obituary by the CBC: Though he found international success, the actor maintained a professional and personal connection to Canada throughout his life. He narrated two documentaries for the National Film Board in the ’80s, lent his voice to the 2015 Canadian animated film Pirate’s Passage and returned to Toronto theatre — where he got his start — in the early 2000s. He was awarded a star on Canada’s Walk of Fame in 2000. “I’m a Canadian. The thing about Canada is that you go from east to west, from Nova Scotia to Vancouver.
It was never really “mostly harmless” Daniel Dale of CNN by now has got to be burned out fact-checking the firehose of false and misleading statements made by the immediate past president at every rally. Dale’s ability to do it in near-real-time has always impressed. But to have that as a job? He runs through 30 of Trump’s lies/exaggerations/misstatements from his Tuesday rally in Racine, Wisconsin in the clip below. Even more soul-sapping, as Tom Nichols puts it, is that millions of people who live next door lap it up like cream from a saucer, “willfully blinding” themselves to the truth, as Peter Wehner put it, or exhibiting “motivated unreasoning” as I did.
SCOTUS is stalling The National Review comments on the remaining decisions to come out of the Supreme Court: The Supreme Court is scheduled to deliver opinions this Thursday and Friday. There should be 21 opinions remaining because there are 23 cases left, including two pairs (the Chevron challenges and the Florida and Texas social-media laws) that are consolidated and likely to be decided together. We will likely get at least five or six opinions this week, maybe as many as nine. The Court will need to schedule more opinion days next week, probably at least three of them if it intends to wrap up the term by the end of the week; otherwise, it could spill over to July 1 or 2. NR provides a handy chart of what’s left. Notice what’s at the bottom: Leah Litman writes at the New York Times: For those looking for the hidden hand of politics in what the Supreme Court does, there’s plenty of reason for suspicion on Donald Trump’s as-yet-decided immunity case given its urgency. There are, of course, explanations that have nothing to do with politics for why a ruling still hasn’t been issued.
Paul Krugman writes: A few days ago Donald Trump floated a truly terrible, indeed unworkable economic proposal. I’m aware that many readers will say, “So what else is new?” But in so doing, you’re letting Trump benefit from the soft bigotry of rock-bottom expectations, not holding him to the standards that should apply to any presidential candidate. A politician shouldn’t be given a pass on nonsense because he talks nonsense all the time. But in a way the most interesting thing about Trump’s latest awful policy idea is the way his party responded, with the kind of obsequiousness and paranoia you normally expect in places like North Korea. What Trump reportedly proposed was an “all tariff policy” in which taxes on imports replace income taxes. Why is that a bad idea? First, the math doesn’t work. Annual income tax receipts are around $2.4 trillion; imports are around $3.9 trillion. On the face of it, this might seem to suggest that Trump’s idea would require an average tariff rate of around 60 percent.