Sunlight to a vampire Formerly Twitter observed that there are more images and video of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce hugging and kissing after Sunday’s AFC Championship Game than of the JFK assassination. It’s been nagging at me in a good way. David Letterman called it “a lovely thing.” He calls Swift “a glowing, bright light of goodness in the world,” and sorely needed. Fans began calculating travel time, and whether Swift will be able to fly back from her Tokyo show in time to make the Super Bowl. Others noted that during the celebration on the field that Swift stepped aside so Travis Kelce could share a moment alone with his brother Jason. Swift shared warm hugs with Travis’ mother and father and sister. It’s an entire glowing, bright light of family values goodness. Naturally, the right web is seething and losing what’s left of its mind. The right’s lunatic fringe is floating insane consipracy theories about the left using Swift to rig the Super Bowl, and Swift planning to endorse Joe Biden at halftime, etc. The entire relationship is fabricated for ratings and political advantage, dontcha know?
Uncategorized
A party of frauds E. Jean Carroll’s attorney Shawn Crowley last week rebutted Donald Trump lawyers’ argument to the jury in his $83.3 million defamation case. She distilled Trump and Trumpism to his/its essence (CNN): Crowley concluded her rebuttal by saying essentially that Trump believes he is above the law. Trump believes that “He gets to lie. He gets to threaten. He gets to ignore a jury verdict. He gets to defy the law and the rules of this courtroom,” Crowley said. “You saw how he behaved through this trial. Rules don’t apply to Donald Trump.” “Ladies and gentleman, this isn’t a campaign rally. It’s not a press event. It’s a court of law and Miss Carroll’s life,” Crowley said. “Donald Trump sexually assaulted her. He defamed her. He is not the victim.” But MAGA Republicans are MAGA Republicans because they believe, as Trump believes of himself, that they are victims. Trump portrays himself as the patron saint of victims, and their avatar. Trump is special. Oh so special.
I can usually suss out what they’re talking about but in this case I just don’t get it. Why is this going to win him the election? E. Jean Carroll going shopping with the 83 million in damages she won from Trump defaming her? That she offered to take Rachel Maddow with her? So what? How is that the political death blow to Biden? Whatever. I guess I shouldn’t question the logic of people who think Taylor Swift is a Pentagon Psy-op to sabotage Trump’s election. There’s no point.
The right is pimping this fatuous notion that Trump never lost a life (not counting the hundreds of thousands from COVID, of course) during his presidency. Why do they think this? Because Dear Leader says so: “we would right now have Peace throughout the World” if Jesus Christ … er… Donald Trump were president. He says that and they believe it. His and others’ recitation of the Trump presidency is not true. Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal and set them back on the course to being a pariah state. It hasn’t gone well. CNN’s Briana Keilar on Monday got into a heated exchange with Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL) over the Biden administration’s Middle East policy, which he said was emboldening Iran to sign off on proxy attacks on American soldiers. During an interview, Keilar argued to Waltz that figuring out how to deter Iran-backed proxies had plagued multiple administrations, including Trump’s whose policies Waltz touted as a better alternative. “I know you’re critical of President Biden, that you think he is emboldening Iran, but how should the U.S.
CBS reports: When Brittany Watts woke up at her Warren, Ohio, home on Sept. 22, 2023, she knew she was miscarrying. Her 22-week-old fetus had been declared nonviable by doctors several days prior. Bleeding and in pain, she spent a total of 19 hours in the hospital over a span of two days, begging to be induced. But an ethics group at Mercy Health – St. Joseph Warren Hospital had concerns about Ohio’s abortion laws and how they applied to Watts’ case, ultimately resulting in hours of delayed care. Watts, frustrated with the lengthy wait times, said she left the hospital both days against medical advice. She said she miscarried alone in her own bathroom. When Watts returned to Mercy Health for medical care following the miscarriage she says a nurse rubbed her back and told her everything would be okay before calling the police at the direction of the hospital’s risk management team and asking them to go to her home to find the fetus. As Watts recovered in her hospital bed, officers from the Warren City Police Department searched her home.
As Putin smiles As a child of the 1960s, I hate sounding like a Cold Warrior here, but c’mon. Moscow is gleeful. As gleeful as Stephen Miller pondering loading immigrants onto rail cars. As gleeful as a cheering MAGA rally at the idea of police shooting looters and brown-skinned migrants. Russian operatives had to get their hand dirty to help Donald Trump win election in 2016. Since then, MAGA Republicans have internalized Vladimir Putin’s thirst for the kind of chaos and insurrection that might tear apart the U.S. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is pleased to toss more fuel on the fire. The Supreme Court vacated an appeals court decision that allowed Texas to deny federal officials from accessing a portion of the Texas border with Mexico. In response, writes Jonathan Last: … the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, responded that the Supreme Court’s order “allows Biden to continue his illegal effort to aid the foreign invasion of America.” Which is a perfectly normal statement for an officer of the court to make, I guess? It’s not clear what Texas Republicans think they are doing. Are they trying to trigger the libs? Or hurt Biden?
Yeah, it’s a cult Keeping up with five social media accounts after Musk bought Twitter is a pain. It’s worse (for those of a certain age) than juggling VHS and Betamax tapes until the market sorts out which format becomes the popular default. Plus, WordPress does not cleanly allow pasting in video from Mastodon, Threads or Blue Sky. So for now, I’m still following “X” even if I’m not supplying content for Musk’s right-wing platform. Ironically, there is still content there that pushes back against white nationalism. For your amusement then, here are three posts that appeared in this order, one after the other, in my feed this morning. Starting with this guy below: “Fact, we would not have one Democrat president in the last 50 years if women couldn’t vote. So I don’t want women to vote …”
Nikki Haley may not have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning the Republican nomination but she’s decided she’s not going to go quietly. She’s not only needling Trump constantly about his mental fitness, she’s taken on the RNC for their servile move to prematurely declare Trump the “presumptive nominee.” In her town halls in South Carolina she’s become downright feisty: I suspect it’s the laughing at him that bothers him the most although I doubt it’s the first time a woman has done so. You have to wonder what might have been if Haley and the others had gone after Trump this way from the beginning. I always assumed he would win the nomination but they didn’t have to make it so easy for him. Who knows, if they had jumped on him hard in those days after the 2022 loss when many in the party were saying they were getting tired of losing and blaming his disastrous endorsements, maybe one of them could have made a real run for it. In the end, trying so hard not to alienate him and his followers didn’t work anyway.
So he can say “I alone can fix it.” The Republicans have a problem. They had hoped to rope in Independents and GOP moderates by insisting that the economy is so bad that America simply must elect a Republican to fix it. it’s worked in the past at times but the reality is that Democrats tend to fix the economy after Republicans break it and in this case it’s not looking like it’s going to be a winning electoral issue for them;. So they’re banking on the border, one of their perennial scaremongering tactics to get them over the line this time. Trump is saying it out loud: This bill is actually a very Republican friendly bill without any concessions to the Democrats which will make it a no-go among many of them. And we know they want the issue for the election. But as Greg Sargent points out, there is more to it than that: I think it’s no accident that Trump and MAGA are trying to sink this deal even as Trump and Miller are loudly advertising plans for an extraordinarily cruel and draconian second-term crackdown.
Trump says America is failing and the economy is crashing. He couldn’t be more wrong: The European economy, hobbled by unfamiliar weakness in Germany, is barely growing. China is struggling to recapture its sizzle. And Japan continues to disappoint. But in the United States, it’s a different story. Here, despite lingering consumer angst over inflation, the surprisingly strong economy is outperforming all of its major trading partners. Since 2020, the United States has powered through a once-in-a-century pandemic, the highest inflation in 40 years and fallout from two foreign wars. Now, after posting faster annual growth last year than in 2022, the U.S. economy is quashing fears of a recession while offering lessons for future crisis-fighting. “The U.S. has really come out of this into a place of strength and is moving forward like covid never happened,” said Claudia Sahm, a former Federal Reserve economist who now runs an eponymous consulting firm.