Is anyone surprised? I don’t think anything could be more predictable, not even the sun coming up tomorrow. “It is abundantly clear that former President Trump has earned the requisite support of Republican voters to be our nominee for President of the United States,” McConnell said in a statement to The Washington Post. “It should come as no surprise that as nominee, he will have my support. During his presidency, we worked together to accomplish great things for the American people including tax reform that supercharged our economy and a generational change of our federal judiciary — most importantly, the Supreme Court. I look forward to the opportunity of switching from playing defense against the terrible policies the Biden administration has pursued to a sustained offense geared towards making a real difference in improving the lives of the American people.” McConnell — who has announced he will step down from his leadership role in November — is one of the most influential Washington Republicans to back Trump, and the endorsement was a remarkable, if expected, move from the Kentucky Republican.
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That’s quite an invitation, no? By contrast, here’s Biden: You tell me which one is fit to be president. By the way, this from Dave Weigel is interesting: A super PAC that urged non-Republicans to cast primary votes for Nikki Haley is pivoting to November, urging Haley’s voters to support President Joe Biden. Starting today, Primary Pivot will become Haley Voters for Biden, and urge anyone who supported Haley in a swing state to stick with the president in November. “This is an effort from people who have actually supported Nikki Haley to try to guide as many of them as possible toward the candidate that respects democracy, even if they may disagree with him politically,” said Primary Pivot co-founder Robert Schwartz. In a statement, Primary Pivot said it would focus on Haley voters in states where they could be counted — nearly 300,000 in Michigan, and nearly 250,000 in North Carolina. The super PAC, which started by urging New Hampshire Democrats to temporarily switch their registrations, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to activate potential Haley voters in South Carolina and Super Tuesday states.
One of the all time great con jobs As I watched the Super Tuesday returns last night I was struck by exit polls which showed that the economy is the most important issue to many Republican voters and they believe Donald Trump will be better for them financially than President Biden. Considering how successfully Biden has managed a swift recovery from the economic catastrophe he inherited, I find that disturbing but according to the NY Times, a majority of the electorate is suffering from “collective amnesia” and doesn’t remember why they ousted Trump back in 2020. Apparently, they are nostalgic for the golden days of a Trump administration that never existed. I don’t know if that amnesia will be cured by facts and statistics, but even Fox News has to admit that the Biden economy is doing very well. Nonetheless, Trump and all of his various henchmen spend their days insisting that the economy is on the verge of collapse. Last night during his low-energy victory speech he said it once again and as he told Lou Dobbs in an interview in January, he hopes it will crash within the next 12 months so that he won’t be like Herbert Hoover.
Sometimes I feel as if they’re just trying to make me think I’m crazy. I never in a million years would have thought that Republicans would cut the funding for the FBI but here we are. I think the most astonishing thing about this is that they’ve done it strictly for the purpose of defending that cretin Donald Trump. It’s not that they’ve truly decided that the police need to be hemmed in or that the FBI is too big and powerful. They just want to exact revenge on behalf of their Dear Leader. If he wins they’ll pack it with toadies and give them everything they ever wanted to go after their enemies.
I don’t think TV ads work the way they used to but it can’t hurt to try a simple message and repeat it over and over again. Repetition is key: An estimated $2.7 billion is expected to be spent just on presidential campaign advertising this cycle. Pro-Biden super PACs Future Forward and American Bridge already have committed to a blizzard of ads, with $250 million and $200 million in spending respectively, as Democrats prepare an onslaught of ads to turn voters’ attention away from Biden’s age and remind them of Trump’s chaotic first term. In a memo released Wednesday morning, the Biden campaign said that groups allied with it had committed to spending more than $700 million to help defeat Trump. And with the president’s team eager to turn 2024 into a choice election for voters, plans are in place for the campaign itself to ramp up contrast ad-spending this spring. A person familiar with Biden’s campaign strategy but not authorized to speak about it publicly said it will come earlier than when then-President Barack Obama’s allies began turning up the heat on Republican rival Mitt Romney in 2012.
People need to be reminded. It was so, so bad.
As we all know, I’ve been away from the blog for quite a while. So, naturally, I’m a little rusty. But I didn’t know how rusty until I finished No. 152 and looked back to my notes: That is literally “all she wrote.” I abandoned it before I even started it. But I didn’t necessarilyContinue reading 152. Italian Pork Chops
18% of Republicans are angry or dissatisfied with him. And he’s basically telling them to get lost, he doesn’t need them.
Elie Mystal’s latest piece in The Nation is a must read. I agree with his title and his premise: The Supreme Court Must Me Stopped. My question is “So how do we stop them?” There IS a way, and we need to act. Before you go into the, “Yeah, but…” read the whole piece, he lays out several steps to take, starting with changing our attitudes. We have to stop treating them as they want to be treated, as 9 law shamans. We need to treat them as “politicians in robes.” This court has proven with its actions—through one politically motivated decision after another—that it is unfit to wield the power that it does.” The Supreme Court Must Be Stopped, Elie Mystal in the Nation. March 1, 2024 I’m an activist so I know that there are multiple steps to make something happen. Elie starts out with changing how we in the public perceive the court. Mystal, “The first step toward stopping the Supreme Court’s political actions is to treat the justices as political actors and subject them to all of the scrutiny, pressure, and protest normal political actors face every day.
As I write this we’re awaiting the results of the Super Tuesday primary elections and obviously, we’ll be talking about that tomorrow. For now, I thought you might be interested in smart discussion of the presidential polls from Josh Marshall. First of all, he says that the good pollsters have a pretty good way of modeling the electorate and we shouldn’t dismiss the polls just because people don’t answer the phone. Ok. I’m a little bit skeptical that anyone can correctly divine who’s going to turn out in election in these weird times but I’ll take his word for it. Anyway, here are a couple more good insights worth thinking about: You need to believe these polls. But we need to break down what we’re talking about. People often say polling right now isn’t the same as this fall. But it’s not just that the election’s eight months from now and things can change over eight months. Public opinion just functions differently in the weeks before a national election than it does eight months before it. It becomes clearer who is and who isn’t going to vote.