Via Axios: Muslim Americans in several swing states are scheduled to gather in Michigan on Saturday to start a campaign they’re calling #AbandonBiden, a reflection of their outrage over President Biden‘s handling of the Israel-Hamas war. Arab American and Muslim American anger could hurt Biden’s re-election prospects in most of the 2024 swing states he won in 2020, as those groups have been heavily Democratic. Muslim American leaders from Michigan, Minnesota, Arizona, Wisconsin, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, and Pennsylvania are expected to meet in Dearborn, Mich., to start the new campaign. “This #AbandonBiden 2024 conference is set against the backdrop of the upcoming 2024 presidential election and the decision to withdraw support for President Biden due to his unwillingness to call for a ceasefire and protect innocents in Palestine and Israel,” the group said in a statement. “Leaders from swing states will work together to guarantee Biden’s loss in the 2024 election.” The campaign primarily will focus on social media for now, organizer Jaylani Hussein of Minneapolis tells Axios.
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Trump has always been a sloppy speaker. But he’s not the same person he was, that’s clear. Someone pointed out the other day that the past and the present seem to be merging in his mind at times. The stuff where he’s talking about golden showers and how his wife took it and constantly saying that Obama is president are tells that something is off in his sense of time and place. Here are a couple more excerpts from speeches he gave this weekend. They are bizarrely disjointed even for him. Some are just the usual misspeaking but he doesn’t seem to realize he’s done it. In the past he would do some verbal gyration to cover it (of course, he would never say “excuse me” and correct himself as normal people do) but he just sails past this stuff now. This is just delusional: This is a massive Freudian slip: Of course, he’s also the same jackass he always was: The Flock of Seagulls hairdo gets more elaborate by the day. Can he not see it?
DeSantis tries to ape Trump again, in the stupidest way possible: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he would replace Obamacare with a “better plan” — part of an interview in which he criticized former President Donald Trump for failing to deliver on numerous policy promises during his term in the White House, including frequent pledges to replace the health care law. “Obamacare hasn’t worked,” DeSantis said in the interview with moderator Kristen Welker, which aired Sunday morning. “We are going to replace and supersede with a better plan.” He declined to provide details about how his plan would “supersede” Obamacare, also known as the Affordable Care Act, adding that his campaign would most likely roll out a proposal in the spring. I can’t wait. I think this is good. With all the Republicans now falling in line to repeal Obamacare and kill Social Security and Medicare, in addition to their hostility to abortion rights, I think we have the makings of a good domestic argument about the future. And they are on the wrong side of it.
As Israel resumes its bombing of Gaza, the risk of a wider regional war grows. Mouin Rabbani analyzes the military and propaganda battles between Hamas and Israel.
The post Two Months That Shook the World: The First Phase of the Gaza War appeared first on The Intercept.
Free at last! George Santos is Rep. Santos no more. In a bipartisan vote that handily exceeded the two-thirds requirement, the U.S. House voted to expel the mutiply indicted Santos on Friday morning. Not to worry, George Washington Anthony Elizabeth Taylor Devolder Kitara Julius Caesar Santos will land on his feet, even if he has (for now) denied he is in talks with “Dancing With the Stars.” He’ll have no trouble staying busy. Facing 23 felony charges (he has pleaded not guilty) Santos has a full schedule planning for his trial in September next year: The schemes laid out by prosecutors are wide ranging. Prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York say he falsified campaign reports with fake donations and fictional personal loans to artificially bolster his standing. They say he stole from donors, using their credit cards without authorization and through a Florida company called Redstone Strategies. And they have charged him with collecting more than $20,000 in unemployment payments when he was, in fact, employed. Prosecutors say that Mr. Santos used the money on personal expenses, including designer goods and credit card payments.
What a concept The passing of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman named to the U.S. Supreme Court, has received a flood of remembrances. But one in particular emphasizes what differentiates her from justices who came later. She was a politician first, “rising to become the majority leader of the Arizona state Senate” (Politico, Peter S. Canellos): In its history, the court has been divided almost evenly between justices whose primary experience was in electoral politics, law practice or academics, with many of the academic-minded justices having spent significant time as judges on federal courts. But over the years the profile of a judicial nominee shifted strongly in favor of scholarly judges. Today, potential Supreme Court justices tend to establish their judicial ambitions at a very early age, often in their 20s, attain lower-court appointments in their 30s or early 40s and thereby position themselves for appointment to the high court before they reach middle age.
Remember when Donald Trump held a press conference to announce that? He made the announcement in response to an attack on Dallas Police in 2016: And you remember how tough he wanted to be on protesters, right? Well…
Biden does some mild corporate bashing. And it’s smart politics: President Joe Biden took aim at corporations for charging prices he said were artificially high even though the rate of inflation has slowed and some shipping costs have fallen. “Any corporation that has not brought their prices back down, even as inflation has come down, even as the supply chains have been rebuilt, it’s time to stop the price-gouging,” Biden said at the launch of a new White House supply chain initiative. “Give the American consumer a break.” While it’s true that the annual rate of inflation has cooled from its high last summer, this doesn’t translate directly into falling consumer prices. It only means that prices are rising at a lower rate. Prices for some everyday goods have fallen over the past year, a reality reflected in lower Thanksgiving costs this year, for example. And lower costs have in turn left some consumers with more money in their budgets for things like Black Friday shopping, which rose 7.5% this past weekend over a year ago.
They have lost their minds He’s not lying.
Philip Bump takes the time to outline all the ways that Trump has already shown that he will fulfill the plans he’s touting on the campaign trail [T]his would not be comparable to his inauguration in 2017, an event that took most people by surprise and demanded that he quickly figure out what, exactly, he was going to do. Positioned between the base that devoured his hostile rhetoric and the party that facilitated his election, he split the difference, bringing with him advisers (Stephen K. Bannon and Reince Priebus, respectively) from each camp. He learned his lesson. The latter camp encouraged him to respect the informal (and, of course, formal) boundaries that accompanied the job. The former camp let him do what he wanted. By the end of his term, nearly all that was left was those enablers, and he’d discovered that most of the boundaries he’d been encouraged to respect were transparently thin. That’s the recognition that he’d take into January 2025. Trump’s rhetoric, as the likelihood of his being renominated increases, has been less constrained even than it was on the campaign trail in 2015.