Liz Cheney floats third-party run Former Rep. Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, has made a splash on her book tour (“Oath and Honor”) in a series of interviews. She pulls no punches about the depths of Republican Party degradation she witnessed before her ouster from Congress after voting for Trump’s Jan. 6 impeachment. She is determined to do “whatever it takes” to prevent a second Trump term, including a third-party run for president (Washington Post): “Several years ago, I would not have contemplated a third-party run,” Cheney said in a Monday interview with The Washington Post. But, she said, “I happen to think democracy is at risk at home, obviously, as a result of Donald Trump’s continued grip on the Republican Party, and I think democracy is at risk internationally as well.” Given her appeal to independents, former Republicans and some Democrats, many Trump critics in both parties have noted that a presidential run by Cheney could undercut her stated goal of defeating Trump, because it could draw some votes away from President Biden.
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Not. Gonna. Happen. There were no Confederate flags, but the high school band still struck up “Dixie” as a fight song at pep rallies before integration finally reached Greenville, South Carolina in 1970. A recent arrival in the “New South,” I was called Yankee now and again. It was strange then. That “heritage” seems even stranger now. Anna Venarchik, herself an Alabama native, writes about the legacy of The United Daughters of the Confederacy. The UDC over decades very successfully retconned the Civil War as something other than bloody treason by an entire region of the country to prevent the future I saw at a northern Virginia Waffle House. That too was a Lost Cause. “They all think we’re white supremacists but they don’t want to bother to find out,” said one member on a Zoom Venarchik attended this decade.” Who “they” were went unsaid. “I am interested in people understanding that the organization is a forward-looking organization,” a youngish septuagenarian from a New York chapter told Venarchik, before reversing herself and declining an interview.
A look at the 18-24 year old cohort a year out I’m taking all polls with a grain of salt, including this one. But it’s interesting to get a sense of what this particular group is thinking because this is the first presidential election for most of them and like every sub-group of any generation, they have their own experiences and live in a unique world of conventional wisdom that has no other context. Just 49% of voters aged 18-29 say they “definitely” plan on voting for president next year, according to the new canvass by the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School. That’s “From a lack of trust in leaders on a variety of critical issues such as climate change, gun violence, and the war in the Middle East, to worries about the economy and AI, young people’s concerns come through loud and clear in our new poll,” Setti Warren, the institute’s director, said in a statement.
With “friends” like these … This story about the head of the Florida GOP and his wife, the founder of LGBTQ-hating Moms for Liberty, is stunning: The head of Florida’s Republican Party indicated Saturday he will not step down while facing an investigation into sexual assault, rejecting calls by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to give up his role as the party’s top operative. In a letter to the state GOP, chairman Christian Ziegler did not address the allegation – which continued to send shockwaves through the state on Saturday as troubling new details about the investigation emerged – but suggested a conspiracy was afoot to leak details from the Sarasota Police Department probe. “We have a country to save and I am not going to let false allegations of a crime put that mission on the bench as I wait for this process to wrap up,” he wrote.
I’m sure he’ll be right back in the Senate GOP fold now. No biggie. He’s still on their team. FFS: Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama, announced on Tuesday that he would lift his blockade of nearly all the military promotions he had delayed for almost a year in protest of a Pentagon policy ensuring abortion access for service members, continuing to hold up only the most senior generals. Mr. Tuberville said he had lifted his holds on about 440 military promotions. “Everybody but the 10 or 11 four-stars,” he said. “Those will continue.” The announcement represented a stark reversal from Mr. Tuberville, who for 10 months had steadfastly defended his move to stall senior military promotions over a new Pentagon policy that offers time off and travel reimbursement to service members seeking abortions or fertility care. His blockade had single-handedly disrupted the Pentagon’s ability to fill its top ranks, leaving hundreds of promotions in limbo.
It’s way more likely than we think David Frum is one Never Trumper from whom I still recoil even though I’m a big believer in a popular front against Trump. He’s still a wingnut in some very important ways. Nonetheless, this big Atlantic issue about what will happen if Trump wins has a number of good articles and I thought his was was especially thought provoking: A second Trump term would instantly plunge the country into a constitutional crisis more terrible than anything seen since the Civil War. Even in the turmoil of the 1960s, even during the Great Depression, the country had a functional government with the president as its head. But the government cannot function with an indicted or convicted criminal as its head. The president would be an outlaw, or on his way to becoming an outlaw. For his own survival, he would have to destroy the rule of law. From Trump himself and the people around him, we have a fair idea of a second Trump administration’s immediate priorities: (1) Stop all federal and state cases against Trump, criminal and civil. (2) Pardon and protect those who tried to overturn the 2020 election on Trump’s behalf.
I could hardly believe I heard him right and had to listen to it twice. Not much is shocking these days but this is. The Speaker of the House is protecting the insurrectionists from the FBI. And he’s admitting it as if it is perfectly normal. This is so far beyond normal we’re living in another dimension now. We are broken.
Krugman is on the case Let’s deal in reality for a moment shall we? Over the past six months, the personal consumption expenditure deflator excluding food and energy — I know that’s a mouthful, but it’s the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of underlying inflation — has risen at an annual rate of only 2.5 percent, down from 5.7 percent in March 2022. The Fed’s inflation target is 2 percent, so we’re not quite there yet. And you shouldn’t expect the Fed to declare victory any time soon. As I can tell you from personal experience, anyone suggesting that inflation is more or less under control can expect an avalanche of hate mail and hostile commentary on social media. In fact, I believe that the vehemence with which some Americans insist that inflation is still running wild distorts coverage in conventional media, too, because journalists are deterred from saying anything positive. And the Fed has to be especially careful, because it would lose credibility if inflation went back up after sounding too optimistic. The truth, however, is that inflation is looking very much like yesterday’s problem.
Though I have been interested in ecological economics ever since I read The Limits to Growth (Meadows, Randers, and Meadows 1972), E.F. Schumacher (Schumacher 1973, 1979) and Hermann Daly (Daly 1974) in the early 1970s, and I have been a critic of Neoclassical economics for just as long, I didn’t start critiquing the Neoclassical approach … Continue reading "Capitalism, with friends like these, you don’t need enemies"
Apparently, the Washington Post has decided it needs to “move to the center” and I’m sure you know what that means. It’s pretty devastating for them to do this at this particular moment. If we ever needed clear-headed analysis it’s now and if there’s one thing we know, “centrism” (aka “both sides”) is never clear headed. They’ve been laying good people off and one of them is Paul Waldman, one of the best analysts they had. The good news is that he has a newsletter so his insights will still be accessible. (Thank god for blogging, eh?) Here’s one he posted today and I could not agree with it more. Any regular consumer of political news has been deluged with stories recently about traditionally Democratic voting groups who may be ready to defect from Joe Biden in 2024, especially Muslim Americans and young people. It’s mostly about recent events in Israel and Gaza, but the grievances driving this debate have included housing costs, student debt, and climate change.