What’s this I hear about Trump running away with the general election? Nobody on your TV is going to tell you this, so I will: Polls mean nothing right now, as you know. But these are no more meaningless than any of the others. The sad reality is that this race is inexplicably close and Democrats are going to have to work their asses off. Too many people have forgotten what a nightmare Trump was and unfortunately tens of millions of people loved him then and love him now. (That’s what should keep us up at night…) Still, considering the relentless doom and gloom about Biden over the past few months, I think we should take heart in the fact that despite the sour mood in the country at least half the people haven’t lost their minds. Happy Hollandaise!
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Trump showed the GOP they can be as racist as they want to be They don’t care about no woke criticism. They’re just going for it: Donald Trump is getting headlines for saying immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” But for months the GOP race for president has been shadowed by xenophobia, as some candidates or those backing them have embraced racist and white nationalist themes. It’s partly a reflection of how Trump has moved Republican politics toward the harder-edged, “us vs. them” view that now dominates the GOP’s base and is reshaping its membership in Congress. This is from Axios. It’s nice that they’ve noticed it’s not just Trump. It’s very important to report this because there may be a handful of people who have always voted Republican who are not exactly on board with the crudeness of this.
Anti-abortion zealots aren’t going to adopt them, that’s for sure We know they don’t care about babies once they’re out of the womb. Why would they want to adopt them? Reminder: Sixty percent of kids who have lost Medicaid coverage this year came from just nine states, all of which are Republican-led, according to new data from the Biden administration. And the 10 states refusing the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid to low-income adults have disenrolled more kids than all of the expansion states combined, the administration also reported… Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Montana, New Hampshire, Ohio, South Dakota and Texas Some of those states (I’m looking at you Texas and Florida) among those states with the most draconian abortion bans in the nation. This should be embarrassingly hypocritical to these people but they are shameless. After all, these are the same clinic harassers who whine that the man “harassing” them about adoption is being rude. I highly recommend reading this piece in In These Times about what happens to people who are forced to have more children than they can afford.
Tipping points—elements of the Earth’s climatic system that can be flipped from one state to another with a relatively minor change in temperature, and which could then cause major and abrupt changes in the climatic system itself—are a key concern for climate scientists (Lenton et al. 2023, p. 36). One of leading scientists in this … Continue reading "Neoclassical economics and the demise of capitalism"
No, not a Tom Hanks sequel The Colorado Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled 4-3 that Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment is not a dead letter. The court found Donald J. Trump ineligible to appear on the 2024 Colorado primary ballot. The Jan. 6 violence was consciously encouraged by Trump, that the violence constituted an insurrection, that his actions are disqualifying, and that no legislative action is required to make it so. The provision is self-executing. The case brought by several Republicans and one independent voter charged that it would violate state election law if Secretary of State Jena Griswold placed an ineligible candidate on the Colorado primary ballot. Specifically, that Trump is ineligible (Washington Post): “A majority of the court holds that President Trump is disqualified from holding the office of President under Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution,” the decision reads.
Your right to vote: Use it or lose it Antidemocratic actions in Republican-led legislatures. Militias gearing up for a second civil war (and staging to go weapons-hot on Jan. 6). Donald Trump echoing the rhetoric of Hitler and Mussolini. An economy and an ecology that’s left younger Americans with grimmer prospects than their parents’. Is it any wonder many younger Americans lack enthusiasm for a gridlocked politics that has not served them well? Winston Churchill said (but did not originate the phrasing): Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, continuously rule, and that public opinion, expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters.
Or will they help the GOP cut its losses and move on? Donald Trump came to America’s attention as a political actor back in 2011 when he became the self-appointed leading voice on the right insisting that President Barack Obama had been illegally elected president because he supposedly wasn’t born in the US. He made all the rounds of the news shows demanding that Obama produce his birth certificate even claiming that he sent people to Hawaii, Obama’s birthplace, telling the Today show audience “they cannot believe what they’re finding.” When Obama produced the birth certificate Trump claimed “an extremely reliable source” told him it was a forgery. This went on for years until Trump was elected president in 2016. And it was all a lie. Isn’t it so typically Trump that after all that it would be him who turned out to be disqualified from the presidential ballot? At least that’s what the Colorado Supreme Court ruled last night in a case that cites the 4th Amendment barring officers of the government from running if they’ve participated in an insurrection.
The cult has been going mad over this: Donald Trump keeps sharing a photo on social media featuring a bright-red arrow pointing at the head of a bearded man at his civil fraud trial — claiming he is the son of the judge. The Post can now confirm that the pictured bespectacled, well-groomed target is not the kin of Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron. I should know — I’m the guy in the photo. Trump, 77, on Tuesday yet again signal-boosted the photo of me sitting a few rows into the court gallery along with an article by a fringe-right activist inexplicably claiming Engoron’s son is “financially benefitting” from being given a “prominent” seat at the trial. The post went out to Trump’s 6.52 million followers on the Truth Social app. It was the second time within a month that the former president shared the photo of me and a screenshot of the Nov. 7 article from Laura Loomer, an anti-Muslim activist who once described Islam as a “cancer” and has been banned from social media sites in the past.
Are you sure? It seems like this new year can’t get any more turbulent or our political system more volatile. We’re going to have Donald Trump on trial, epic Supreme Court decisions, foreign policy crises and, oh yeah, the most important election of our lives. I’m already reeling with it and I’m sure you are too. We are living through very, very consequential times. Obviously, the end of the cold war shook everything up after 40 years of a stand-off and the modern conservative movement’s long-term project finally flowering changed our politics. But things have been hurtling at warp speed over the past two decades with an epic terrorist attack that sent the nation into a frenzy and enabled a tragic war from which we still have not fully recovered. The financial crisis of 2008 was the worst economic catastrophe the vast majority of us have ever experienced. (Only the very oldest Americans went through the Great Depression.) The technological revolution of the last few decades is changing our lives so quickly that we can’t keep up from day to day.
This should have been interrogated a little bit more. These people disapprove of Biden’s Israel policy but think his support for Israel and Palestine is about right? I guess they might not think he shouldn’t support of either of them at all but that seems like a stretch. It’s weird question but it should be this confusing. I think this shows the limitations of polling right now. People are expressing their discontent with Joe Biden on the economy despite telling pollsters their own financial situation is improved and they’re saying they disapprove of his handling of Israel despite the fact that they think he’s gotten the balance between the two warring parties about right. They’re basically saying they disapprove of Joe Biden and it actually has nothing to do with his policies. In fact, they like his policies. They’ve just decided they don’t like him. I have to assume that some of this (at least among swing voters and Democrats) is about the PTSD dynamic that lingers from the pandemic and also the chaos that Trump and the Republicans constantly cause and which people think Biden is impotent to stop.