Catherine Rampell tweeted this short thread that I think expresses the fundamental political message that the Democrats have to hammer home: political FREEDOM. The more significant political fallout of this IVF discourse may not be revelation that GOP is often anti-family (surprise!), but rather the undermining of narrative that Dems are merely “pro-abortion” (rather than pro-reproductive freedom) Subtext (or text) of Repub attacks on Dem abortion positions is that they’re driven by childless elites who want to kill babies. IVF debate suggests Ds are promoting not abortion, but freedom—specifically, reproductive freedom, to choose when to begin or expand your family If Dems are smart, this is the angle they’ll play up — perhaps taking a page from @SecretaryPete’s 2020 campaign, about how Dems should reclaim “freedom” as a rhetorical device. His message should be even more compelling today, as one party considers putting an authoritarian in office. 2024’s political “freedom” fight isn’t about mask mandates.
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Salon caught Trump’s latest late night freakout. He seems upset: Donald Trump began his Monday raging about the slew of civil and criminal trials mounting against him, bemoaning specifically local trials like the New York criminal case set to start at the end of March. The former president recently attended a hearing in that case, which was brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and charges him with 34 felony counts related to alleged hush-money payments he made to an adult film actress in 2016. The presiding judge denied Trump’s request to dismiss the case and set a March 25 trial date. Despite a triumphant Saturday following his win in South Carolina’s GOP primary, Trump’s slate of legal troubles seemed to take center stage for him Sunday. Just before midnight, he took to Truth Social to praise a Fox News show he was viewing about his New York state fraud case, in which he was ordered to pay $355 million in penalties — now $454 million with interest, and encouraged his followers to watch the rerun at 3 a.m. Eastern time. “Wow!
Oh my… From Joe Perticone at The Bulwark: During an appearance yesterday on the Talking Feds podcast, former North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, a Democrat, caused a bit of a stir when she floated a rumor that Rep. Matt Rosendale may have a three-alarm scandal on his hands. Immediately after I heard these words, I reached out to Rosendale’s spokesman Ron Kovach, who replied in an email, “This is 100% false and defamatory and former Senator Heitkamp will be hearing from our lawyers soon.” Heitkamp didn’t outright claim that Rosendale is guilty of what she alleged she heard: She mentioned only that the story has been going around. That is a big difference as far as lawyers are concerned, if they do end up getting involved. But Rosendale suddenly leaving Congress would throw the House into an even greater state of chaos, hard as that might be to imagine. Losing another member of the House Republican Conference would leave the GOP majority so thin that if you held it up you’d be able to see the sun shining through it.
Last night as I was scrolling through Xitter I came across a dozen or so posts excoriating Joe Biden for discussing a possible Gaza ceasefire while he was eating ice cream. He was asked about by a reporter and he answered it. And it was possibly good news too. (He said he was optimistic that there would be a ceasefire by the end of the coming weekend.) But he was bad for doing it while he had an ice cream cone in his hand which I guess means he should not have been eating any ice cream when there is a crisis in Gaza or he should have told the reporter to fuck off, in which case he would have been accused of avoiding the subject. This criticism came from both left and right, which was bizarre. As for the right wingers — whatever. They have to reach for anything they can and this was on the level of “Obama wore a tan suit at the podium” level sophistry from them. From the left, it’s a little bit more serious. I understand that people are very agitated about this war, and they are right to be so. They’re trying to influence Joe Biden to do something to stop the massacre of innocent civilians in Gaza and are using whatever means they have.
New Reuters Ipsos poll: Worries about political extremism or threats to democracy have emerged as a top concern for U.S. voters and an issue where President Joe Biden has a slight advantage over Donald Trump ahead of the November election, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll showed. Overall, 34% of respondents said Biden had a better approach for handling extremism, compared to 31% who said Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination. Sometimes I feel like I’m going crazy. I get why 31% think Trump can better handle extremism — they want a tyrannical authoritarian to put his enemies in camps and he’s promising to do that. But why in the hell does only 34% back Biden on this issue since he’s what’s standing in the way of an extremist wannabe dictator becoming president again? They think he’s old so Trump would be better? What?
Simon sums it up The press loves a horse race like the kid in the story assumes in a room full of manure there must be a pony. Naturally, the Washington Post reports “warning signs for Biden, Trump and Haley” in the Michigan primary results from Tuesday night. The race is on! And it’s a nail-biter! President Biden and former president Donald Trump won the Democratic and Republican primaries in Michigan by huge margins Tuesday night — but there were serious problems for both candidates lurking under the surface. Trump crushed Nikki Haley by over 40 points. Biden, meanwhile, won the Democratic primary by an even more overwhelming margin — but 13 percent of voters marked their ballots “uncommitted” following a campaign to persuade voters to not to support Biden in protest of his support for Israel and his refusal to call for a cease-fire in Gaza. The protesters want a cease-fire. They don’t want Biden to call for one. Biden and his team have been pressing Israel’s Bibi Netanyahu unsuccessfully for a cease-fire for weeks. The press wants to build suspense, though.
Of camels’ noses and tents We’ve warned plenty about the New Apostolic Reformation and the Seven Mountains people. Long before us, Richard Hofstadter warned about the paranoid style in American politics in 1964 in the wake of the McCarthy era. The paranoid style in American religion is closely related. In the late 1970s, Republican operatives decided on mobilizing useful idiots on the religious right for conservative political purposes. They invited the camel to poke its nose under the tent. And in the fullness of time we got QAnon and Trump and MAGA. ALL ONE, like the pepermint soap. Of camels’ noses and tents Axios reports this morning that while Christian nationalism is on the rise, it still remains widely unpopular: How fringe are Christian nationalists?
That ad is from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Campaign for Democracy. T The ad from Campaign for Democracy, which was shared first with NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” features a young woman handcuffed to a hospital bed, screaming for help while a narrator tells viewers, “Trump Republicans want to criminalize young women who travel to receive the reproductive care they need. Don’t let them hold Tennessee women hostage.” “These guys are not just restricting the rights, self-determination to bear a child for a young woman, but they’re also determining their fate as it relates to their future in life by saying they can’t even travel,” Newsom told “Meet the Press” on Saturday. Campaign for Democracy plans to run the ad in Tennessee because of two bills active in the state legislature — one in the state House and one in the state Senate — that would create the crime of “abortion trafficking,” or helping minors obtain abortions without parental consent.
If you liked East Germany ca. 1958, you’re going to love Texas in 2024 Spying on your neighbors, creating a paranoid society, was a prime method of control in the Soviet era. We used to think that was a bad idea: Texas Gov.
Yes, yes it is. So is this: