Stop hand-wringing People feel what they feel. Don’t tell them otherwise, suggests Dave Johnson (now blogging from across the Pond). “Biden & Dems need to be saying, ‘We understand how hard it has been and we’ve been working on it. It is starting to turn around,’” Johnson reminds readers of Seeing the Forest. That was Bill Clinton’s message to the DNC convention that renominated Barack Obama in 2012. The economy was a wreck when Obama took over, but he’s turning it around, Clinton told the assembly: Now, look. Here’s the challenge he faces and the challenge all of you who support him face. I get it. I know it. I’ve been there. A lot of Americans are still angry and frustrated about this economy. If you look at the numbers, you know employment is growing, banks are beginning to lend again. And in a lot of places, housing prices are even beginning to pick up. But too many people do not feel it yet. That was two months before the 2012 election. You know how that worked out.
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Worth repeating “America is more than a country. America is an idea,” former Speaker Kevin McCarthy told an Oxford Union audience in late October. That idea is freedom [timestamp 7:35]. At the New York Times DealBook event last month, McCarthy repeated something else he’d said at Oxford about Americans who are the true caretakers of that idea (Washington Post): “I became leader when we took the minority, and this was a turning point for me,” McCarthy said, describing having attended the 2019 State of the Union address. “I’d just become leader and I’m excited and President Trump’s there. And I look over at the Democrats and they stand up. They look like America,” he told Sorkin. “We stand up. We look like the most restrictive country club in America.” Called it: Robert Calhoon once wrote about colonists who supported the Crown during the American Revolution. “Historians’ best estimates,” he wrote, “put the proportion of adult white male loyalists somewhere between 15 and 20 percent,” a figure not far removed from the Republican base.
Your once and possibly future president , ladies and gentlemen: No, you are not dreaming. That’s who half the country wants to lead it. Oh my: Beck asked Kelly if she thought Trump has cognitively “faded from where he was in 2020.” Kelly’s response: “Yeah, I do … There’s no question Trump has lost a step. Multiple steps. He is confusing Joe Biden for Obama. I know he’s now saying he intentionally did that. Go back and look at the clips. It wasn’t intentional.” “Look, any of us can have a slip of the tongue, but it’s happening to him repeatedly. The reference of how somebody is going to get us into World War Two, confusing countries, confusing cities where he is in, and it’s happening more and more. With all due respect to Trump, this is what happens when you are 77 years old … Are we really going to pretend that Trump is just as vibrant as he was in 2016?”
Mrs. DeSantis makes a huge mistake. And it will cost them. Lol. They really can’t do anything right can they?
The Supreme Court of Texas stayed the order that would have allowed a woman to abort a very high risk pregnancy last night. Here’s a short bio of one of the Justices, who happens to be a radical anti-abortion zealot who calls himself “The Ten Commandments Judge.” John Devine has long been a staunch anti-abortion activist. At a June rally in Fort Worth, Devine told the crowd he had been arrested 37 times while protesting abortion clinics in the 1980s, Smith reported. Though, in a more recent interview, “he said he had been arrested during peaceful protests several times in the 1980s but did not remember how many,” Smith reported. Despite this history of activism, Devine insisted he “is still able to interpret the law impartially.” In 2008, Devine and his wife, Nubia, showed everyone just how committed they were to the pro-life position when her seventh pregnancy endangered her life and that of the baby.
All the salacious details are there for a reason Former prosecutor Harry Litman tweeted this about the Hunter Biden charges: It’s one thing to bring more serious charges against a defendant who has refused to plead–that’s plea bargaining. But Hunter Biden had nothing to do w/ the unwinding of the plea agreement. To turn around after that and charge the same conduct as a nefarious scheme is an abuse. There’s really no disputing that the grave charges against Hunter Biden would not have been filed v almost any other person who had gotten sober and paid back all tax and penalties. And the indictment is sleazy besides. As a former prosecutor, I find the dovetailing of the indictment to the hackish agenda of a political party deeply troubling. Especially when the conduct is unchanged from when the prosecution was offering to plead this out to 2 misdemeanors. Huge chunks of the 56-page indictment of Hunter Biden are about his “extravagant lifestyle,” drugs escorts etc. The relevance of this info to non-payment of taxes is tenuous in the extreme. But it certainly dirties him up.
Lies, Laziness and Propaganda, that’s why Chaos benefits strongmen. This sort of hysteria plays right into MAGA’s hands.
Too much fun to miss Brighten your weekend. Holding the North Carolina governor’s mansion is my Hanukkah wish.
A Texas Tornado of it “Telegraphing” is a euphemism for unconsciously signalling your intentions. Telegraphing a punch in the boxing ring. Like a player’s “tell” in poker. Donald Trump must be the worst player in either arena. Arrogance works like that. Where once he spoke in code like a mob boss, now Trump speaks like an aspiring dictator. When Trump promised Waco, Texas rallygoers in March, “I am your retribution,” collaborators began singing his song like a Greek chorus (ABC News): “We will go out and find the conspirators not just in government, but in the media,” said former Defense Department official Kash Patel during an appearance on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast. Patel, who served as chief of staff in the Department of Defense during the Trump administration and Trump’s counterterrorism adviser on the National Security Council, was asked by Bannon if he would be able to deliver “serious prosecution and accountability” against their political opponents during a second Trump presidency.
Oh my God Many breathless headlines have appeared in the mainstream media over the past few weeks about the impending dictatorship of Donald Trump if he were to win the election next fall. All the major newspapers and magazines have finally begun to delve into exactly what Trump and his henchmen have in store in order to exact his revenge and enact the white nationalist agenda of the MAGA far right. It’s about time. Let’s hope they keep it up. Here are just a few of the proposals that we know about. He plans to gut the EPA, and drill in Alaska to under the illusion that somehow the “profits” will pay for Social Security and medicare (a totally absurd proposal.) He’s going to use the Insurrection Act to deploy the military to quell domestic dissent and he’ll ban homeless camps in cities and put the unhoused in camps as well. And there are very detailed plans to round up millions of migrants and put them in detention camps prior to mass deportation.