Michigan are you listening? Supposedly Fox viewers are working class Joe’s who just can’t stand the coastal elites who are ruining their livelihoods. Yet these people have never been particularly union friendly. But it’s a good thing for a union leader to go on Fox and make the case that Trump was bad for the working man, just in case some retired auto workers in Michigan might be watching. You never know …
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It continues to let us down These numbers appear to be promising: The Bloomberg News/Morning Consult survey found that among voters in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, 53 percent of respondents said they were unwilling to vote for the former president if he is convicted in one of his multiple criminal cases. Forty-six percent of respondents said they are “very unwilling” to cast their ballot for Trump if he is found guilty, while 7 percent said they are “somewhat unwilling.” Twenty-nine percent of respondents said they were “very willing” to vote for Trump if he is convicted of a crime, and 11 percent said they are “somewhat wiling.” The survey found that female voters, voters over 65 and voters with a bachelor’s or post-graduate degree were more likely to say they were unwilling to vote for the former president if he is convicted. Black and Asian voters were also more likely to say they would not vote for Trump if he is convicted.
They’ve already seceded… Scott Rosenberg’s Hopium Chronicles today provides a vivid description of what’s happened to the right wing in this country, beginning with the descent of Fox News into a full-blown propaganda machine that actually communicates in a discrete language spoken by the MAGA cult: My friend Greg Sargent once referred to this fictional world as Foxlandia. It’s a place they go where Trump is a strong leader, the economy is in recession, eggs cost $27 a piece, inflation is still raging, Putin is an ally and the West is sinister, antifa is ISIS, dozens of American cities burned to the ground in 2020, vaccines give you COVID, insurrectionists are hostages, children carrying their rapist’s babies is a blessing, assault weapons bring freedom, etc. It is, to borrow from one of my favorite TV shows, Stranger Things, the upside down. […] In thinking about it today what I am describing perhaps should be understood as a form of succession from the United States and our democratic heritage.
“The election was rigged, I won in a landslide!” This is how Trump convinces his cult that up is down and black is white. He just says something that’s outrageously false, the polar opposite of the truth, with total confidence, over and over again. In fact, his deluded followers often tell reporters that the thing they admire about him the most is that he always tells the truth. Has there ever been a demagogue in history who was so willing to lie so blatantly about clear, observable facts? They always lie, of course. And they are outrageous in their rhetoric. But this brazen defiance of reality seems to me to be pretty unique. I think religious cult leaders do this and get away with it with their flock. But I don’t know that political leaders have been able to get away with it like this. Obviously, it takes a supporting propaganda infrastructure and a monstrously stupid following. But still, give Trump his due. I think he may be the most flagrant, obvious liar in world political history and he’s succeeded in making tens of millions of people believe everything he says.
Congress is using kids to hold Big Tech accountable. Kids will get hurt in the process. In a few minutes, the Senate Judiciary will start a hearing focused on “Big Tech and the Online Child Exploitation Crisis.” Like most such hearings, this will almost certainly go off the rails in a wide variety of directions that I […]
Adam Serwer with an interesting observation on the Supreme Court’s decision in the Texas border case which Gov. Abbott and 25 other red state extremist Governors are openly defying: There are many factors that led to this point. One is the reigning Republican ideology of Trumpism, which holds that only conservative electoral victories, conservative laws, and conservative governments are legitimate and must be obeyed—the ideology that led a mob to ransack the Capitol to overturn an election. Another is the steady drumbeat of catastrophizing right-wing propaganda about the recent rise in migrants at the border, which seeks to validate extreme responses, including violence and lawlessness. But even accounting for those two elements, the most significant proximate reason for Abbott’s response may be that four Supreme Court justices sent Abbott an implicit message that they agreed with him. When the Court sided with the Biden administration, it was a 5–4 split, with Justices John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett joining the three Democratic appointees.
Pennsylvania Supremes condemn Dobbs While MAGA went gaga over Democrats’ secret plot “to turn Taylor Swift into an international pop star and the Kansas City Chiefs into a football dynasty so Swift could then date a Kansas City player and leverage the collective media coverage to get Joseph R. Biden, Jr. elected as President,” the Pennsylvania Supreme Court was throwing the Dobbs decision overturning Roe back in the U.S. Supreme Court’s faces. Pennsylvania’s highest court ruled on Monday that a woman’s right to reproductive autonomy is “fundamental” (WHYY): With four separate concurring opinions — three of which also dissented in part from the majority opinion — the 219-page decision in Allegheny Reproductive Health Center v. PA Department of Human Services is complex. However, the key — and unanimous — finding was that patients and abortion providers could challenge the state’s 1982 Abortion Control Act, which prohibits the use of Medicaid to cover funding for abortions.
JV Last at the Bulwark points out that everyone needs to take a breath and remember that Nikki Haley is untrustworthy. All you have to do is look back at the way she’s been trying to have it both ways throughout the primary campaign to realize it. I would add that her decision to work for Trump and then sing his praises when she left the administration, promising to campaign for “this one” gesturing to Dear Leader was a low point. Anyway, Last writes: Nick Catoggio argues that Haley is trying to execute “the Half Liz.” He means that she’s attempting to thread the needle between the Liz Cheney and Ron DeSantis positions on Trump: But Catoggio points out that what Haley is saying about Trump now will ultimately matter a lot less than what she says after she quits the race: I wouldn’t get my hopes up. Last notes that she is still trying to hedge her bets quoting her saying that despite all his problems, “I trust the American people to make good decisions.” “I trust the American people to make good decisions” is tautological.
This is what happens when you have a demagogue who has the ability to convince half the country that up is down and black is white. They get rewarded over and over again for fucking everything up. And he wants to do it again. I mentioned yesterday that Trump’s big economic agenda item is: more Chinese tariffs, big ones. He has no reason other than that they are very bad people and they are laughing at us. So, more tariffs. That’s all he knows.
It’s all a conspiracy! They are Soros funded, deep state,pizza parlor pedophiles! As it happens they might want to keep their mouths shut: Taylor Swift could heavily influence the way that Americans vote in the presidential election – with a fifth of voters saying they’re ‘likely’ to back a candidate she endorses. The popstar’s stratospheric influence on popular culture may sway the race to the White House, especially as new Gen Z voters join the electorate this year. In a poll conducted by Redfield & Wilton Strategies for Newsweek, 18 percent of voters say they’re ‘more likely’ or ‘significantly more likely’ to vote for a candidate endorsed by Taylor Swift. Her sway was more visible with voters under the age of 35. This election will see 8 million new voters in the US electorate – and a total of 41 million Gen Z voters, many of whom are influenced by celebrities and social media. […] Trump has weighed in on the romance of Taylor and Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, and made his own predictions of the tryst. ‘I wish the best for both of them.