A quick refresher People don’t know what they don’t know. That’s tautological, but true. One reason I publish ForThe Win every two years (the 5th edition isn’t quite ready) is to give less-experienced Democratic county chairs in under-resourced counties a “cookbook” for assembling a countywide get-out-the-vote program in support of their candidates. State parties assume chairs have already learned the nuts and bolts by the seat of their pants. They instead provide sometimes overly thick manuals focused mainly on party administration. “Where’s the part about electing Democrats?” is my usual reaction. In presidential years, people unfamiliar with local party operations start calling the headquarters here in West Cackalacky (or your Cackalacky). Some have basic election questions. Others want to discuss policy or something they just saw on the news. Angry others want to chew the ears of retiree volunteers who answer the phone as though local committees are part of the Collective with a subspace connection to decisions made in the West Wing. That’s not how this works.
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The Biden campaign is out with a stark new ad featuring a woman talking about traveling out of state to receive an abortion due to Texas’ strict abortion ban. It’s the latest in their push to put reproductive rights front and center in the 2024 race. It will be playing: -during the The Bachelor season premiere -on HGTV, TLC, Bravo, Hallmark, Food Network & Oxygen -during NFL championships – on digital This is very good. But it’s just a start. They need to keep it up.
Trump is not an improvement in any way I hear a lot on my social media these days about how Trump is better than Biden on the Gaza war. That’s utter nonsense. It’s true that Trump isn’t particularly fond of Netanyahu (neither is Biden, actually) but that does not mean that he would ever be an ally of the Palestinians or the Palestinian allies. Donald Trump promised on Monday that if elected president again he will bar immigrants who support Hamas from entering the U.S. and send officers to pro-Hamas protests to arrest and deport immigrants who publicly support the Palestinian militant group. Trump, president from 2017-2021, said that if elected to a second White House term he will ban entry to the U.S. of anybody who does not believe in Israel’s right to exist, and revoke the visas of foreign students who are “antisemitic.” He also vowed to step up travel bans from “terror-plagued countries.” He did not explain how he would enforce his demands, including the one requiring immigrants to support Israel’s right to exist under what he called “strong ideological screening.” … Promising to drastically tighten U.S.
Daniel Uhlfelder went through the FEC reports and found all money paid to law firms by Donald Trump’s Super PAC in the first 6 months of last year. FEC records show that between January 1, 2023, and June 30, 2023, Donald Trump’s Super PAC, SAVE AMERICA, made payments to the following law firms in these amounts:BALLARD SPAHR LLP – $109,174.55 BEDELL, DITTMAR, DEVAULT, PILLANS & COXE, P.A. – $351,040.77 BINNALL LAW GROUP – $1,031,788.33 BLANCHE LAW – $353,090.03 BRAND WOODWARD LAW – 201,948.00 BRITO PLLC – $68,194.50 CADWALADER, WICKERSHAM, & TAFT LLP – $344,950.21 CONTINENTAL PLLC – $1,929,207.90 DHILLON LAW GROUP INC. – $734,730.8 EARTH & WATER LAW, LLC – $347,820 HABBA MADAIO & ASSOCIATES LLP – $1,503,915.14 IFRAH LAW PLLC – $720,009.28 FINDLING LAW FIRM – $541,456.25 KELLOGG, HANSEN, TODD, FIGEL & FREDERICK PLLC – $1,042,479 CHRIS KISE & ASSOCIATES, P.A. – $2,148,536.58 JOHN F. LAURO, P.A.
He’s out. Thank God. Yes, he is the most worthless politician in America: It seems only minutes ago that the whole political world was agog at his tremendous political talent. Well… The lesson? Never assume that the next GOP Great Whitebread Hope is as fantastic as the press corps thinks he is. The other lesson? If you’re going to run as the biggest asshole in politics you’d better have a lot of money and celebrity that makes people think you must be really great anyway. Ron is just an asshole. I am so happy to see the end of him. It’s been a real horror covering his disgusting campaign. Let’s hope we never see him on the national stage again. This massive flame-out argues for him joining Scott Walker and Tim Pawlenty in the Loser Hall of Fame. What does it all mean? We’ll unwind all that in the next few days. But Greg Sargent is right that it spells the end of the big post-pandemic “woke” war. That battle in the culture war is coming to an end, but never fear, the war isn’t over.
Sixty years ago today, Capitol Records issued the “Meet The Beatles!” album, which was the American version of the “With The Beatles” LP that had been issued the previous November in the U.K. I actually didn’t get to listen to … Continue reading
LOLOLOLOL!!! Onstage at a New Hampshire campaign event on Wednesday night, former president Donald Trump bragged about many things: his immigration policies, his passage of a tax cut, the unemployment rates during his administration. He also bragged that he correctly identified a whale on a cognitive test when he was president. “I think it was 30, 35 questions,” the former president said of the test, which he said involved a few animal-identification questions. “They always show you the first one, like a giraffe, a tiger, or this, or that, and then: a whale. ‘Which one is the whale?’ Okay. And that goes on for three or four [questions], and then it gets harder, and harder, and harder.” Trump, 77, said he aced the exam, which he said he took to silence the critics who claim he may be too old or cognitively incapable to run for president. Chief among those critics is former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, who — to gain ground on Trump ahead of the New Hampshire primary — has sharpened her pitch against him by doubling down on questioning his age and cognitive abilities.
Get real, people An online acquaintance once belonged to the Democracy Alliance, a gaggle of liberal millionaire/billionaires formed in 2005 as a lefty counterpart to the Koch donor network. Yes, they’ve done some things to advance the cause, as Michael Tomasky notes below. But conservative moneybags are long-term political investors willing to sink hundreds of millions in media outlets to bend the country’s will over time to theirs. Rich liberals tend to eschew deferring gratification in favor of near-term electoral wins. They want trophies they they can show off to friends the way congressman pose for photos in front of new destroyers. IIRC, my friend left Democracy Alliance in frustration over that, and later the country. Michael Tomasky opines on David Smith’s purchase of The Baltimore Sun at The New Republic: But this column isn’t about the Sun and Smith. In fact, I applaud Smith and Sinclair in one, and only one, respect. They get it. They understand how important media ownership is. They are hardly alone among right-wing megawealthy types. Of course there’s Rupert Murdoch, but there are more.
Removed from reality Somewhere over the last day or so someone remarked that the Masters of the Universe meeting in Davos, Switzerland seem utterly unremarkable. That is, judging by the lack of fresh ideas floating around the ultra-rich conclave. On what to do about fanatical populism spreading across the globe, they’ve got worries but otherwise nothin’, according to Nahal Toosi, Politico’s senior foreign affairs correspondent: In conversation after conversation here, I detected resignation and helplessness among business executives when it came to their counterparts in government. There’s a desperate desire to see the world’s political leaders appeal more to moderates instead of capitalizing on extremes, but there’s also recognition that the political market doesn’t easily reward the people in the middle. C-suite types fear the polarization will only deepen as half of the global population, in more than 60 countries, votes in 2024 — everywhere from South Africa to the United States.
Philip Bump did a necessary deep-dive into James Comer’s mendacity about those transcripts. It’s truly astonishing that they are able to get away with this: One of the arguments offered by attorneys for President Biden’s son Hunter when responding to a subpoena from the House Oversight Committee for a closed-door deposition was that the committee had shown a pattern of cherry-picking what would be presented to the public. This is unquestionably true. Over and over and over and over and over, committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) has made debunked and unsubstantiated public statements that cast the president and/or his son as dishonest or has rushed to release unsubstantiated claims or information that similarly collapse under scrutiny. The first year of his investigation into the Bidens made extremely little progress as a result — except where it matters, in the right-wing media universe. Clearly, though, this has not gone unnoticed by those enmeshed in Comer’s sprawling investigation. There was that letter from Hunter Biden’s lawyer Abbe Lowell in November.