Ten people say the RNC is short of cash Did they have tears in their eyes? Did they say “Sir”? The Washington Post declines to elaborate: The Republican Party’s finances are increasingly worrisome to party members, advisers to former president Donald Trump, and other operatives involved in the 2024 election effort, according to 10 people familiar with the matter. The Republican National Committee disclosed that it had $9.1 million in cash on hand as of Oct. 30, the lowest amount for the RNC in any Federal Election Commission report since February 2015. That compares with about $20 million at the same point in the 2016 election cycle and about $61 million four years ago, when Trump was in the White House. The Democratic National Committee reported having $17.7 million as of Oct. 30, almost twice as much as the Republican Party, with one year before the election. Kevin gets schooled Cash is not the only thing the RNC is short on. “Forget the Alamo!” is the RNC’s new cry of freedom. Kevin McCarthy was Speaker of the House. He holds a degree in marketing. Not his only B.S. Users of formerly Twitter were quick to point out where McCarthy went wrong.
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Don’t lose sight of the big picture David Kurtz at Morning Memo lays out the 2024 stakes: The rule of law is on the ballot in 2024, and it trumps every other political and policy consideration. It is the umbrella under which every other issue is addressed: Want to restore abortion rights? Want to openly debate Israel and Palestine? Want to accelerate the energy revolution to head off the worst of climate change? Good luck. Because if Trump, as promised, harnesses the power of the federal government to attack his perceived political enemies, exact retribution for slights, overturn elections, eviscerate the right to vote, and continue the effort to lock in GOP minority rule, he will break the democratic mechanisms for adjudicating policy preferences, enacting new laws, and enforcing them. Trump is promising a fundamental break with the rule of law and from that will flow a fundamental breakdown in democratic processes and institutions. It is as simple as it is hard to stay at maximum threat level for years on end.
It seems like only yesterday that the entire Republican Party was calling for the smelling salts over the shocking decision by Majority Leader Chuck Schumer that Senators not be required to wear suits and ties on the floor of the Senate. The keening and wailing from the members of both houses over the loss of decorum could be heard from coast to coast. How could the Republic survive such a blow to the dignity of the US Congress? Republicans were so outraged they sent a letter to the Majority Leader registering their “supreme disappointment and resolute disapproval” of the decision. The outcry was so overwhelming that the chamber ended up voting to restore the old dress code so the senate would once again be a place of honor and tradition. How quaint it all seems in light of what commonly happens these days in those sacred halls, mostly at the hands of the Republicans themselves. Just a week or so ago we had a US Senator from Oklahoma challenging a witness at a congressional hearing to a fist fight, right there on the senate floor. We have Supreme Court nominees blatantly lying under oath about their intentions and beliefs and suffering no repercussions.
If Trump manages to carry out his plans in a second term, it will be catastrophic A professor of public policy sounds the alarm about Trump’s 2024 agenda: I study government bureaucracies. This is not normally a key political issue. Right now, it is, and everyone should be paying attention. Donald Trump, the former president and current candidate, puts it in apocalyptic terms: “Either the deep state destroys America or we destroy the deep state.” This is not an empty threat. He has a real and plausible plan to utterly transform American government. It will undermine the quality of that government and it will threaten our democracy. A second Trump administration would be very different from the first. Mr. Trump’s blueprint for amassing power has been developed by a constellation of conservative organizations that surround him, led by the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025. This plan would elevate personal fealty to Mr. Trump as the central value in government employment, processes and institutions. It has three major parts. The first is to put Trump loyalists into appointment positions. Mr.
Dr. Joseph Ladapo is a charlatan and DeSantis doesn’t care Ron DeSantis should be disqualified from ever holding office again on this basis alone: Professors at the University of Florida had high hopes for Joseph Ladapo. But they quickly lost faith in him. In 2021, the university was fast-tracking him into a tenured professorship as part of his appointment as Florida’s surgeon general. Ladapo, Gov. Ron DeSantis’ pick for the state’s top medical official, dazzled them with his Harvard degree and work as a research professor at New York University and UCLA. Professors had anticipated Ladapo would bring at least $600,000 in grant funding to his new appointment from his previous job at UCLA. That didn’t happen. They expected he would conduct research on internal medicine, as directed by his job letter. Instead, he edited science research manuscripts, gave a guest lecture for grad students and wrote a memoir about his vaccine skepticism. Ladapo’s work at UF has generally escaped scrutiny.
Today his lawyers filed a response to the gag order and MSNBC’s Lisa Rubin wrote: Trump’s team has filed its reply on the stay of the New York gag order. There is no response to, much less mention of, the court system’s documentation of the serious and extensive threats to Judge Engoron and his law clerk. https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/nyscef/ViewDocument?docIndex=7vzJVI9/QEvXWmks3wQqTA==… The sole new content concerns Engoron’s rapid rejection of Trump and the other defendants’ motion for a mistrial, despite the attorney general’s position that full briefing and argument would be helpful. Team Trump’s implication is that the same unacceptable bias that drove Engoron to enter the gag order fueled his outright refusal to hear the mistrial motion. So it’s another day and another grievance for Trump without even attempting to distance himself from or disclaim responsibility for the threat environment he created and then inflamed. Sound familiar? It sure does. They aren’t even trying to make serious legal arguments in this case. This is now purely a political exercise.
Three Palestinian college students were shot in Vermont this weekend by a long white man. They don’t know yet whether this shooting was a hate crime although it sure looks like a reasonable suspicion. There was no other apparent motivation. From what we’re gathering, the shooter was a self-described libertarian with some possibly radical views but there isn’t any evidence yet of a particular interest in the crisis in Israel. His mother says he is religious and reads the Bible but he isn’t a far right evangelical as far as we know. At this point his motives are a mystery since he hasn’t said anything to the authorities. The kids’ families are distraught, of course. They thought they were sending their boys to a safer place: The uncle of a Palestinian college student who was shot on a Vermont street over the weekend said Monday that his nephew left his home in the West Bank to seek safety in the U.S. as he studied. Now, that uncle says his family feels “betrayed” after Kinnan Abdalhamid was nearly killed as he walked on a street in Burlington, Vermont, with two of his friends on Saturday night.
The Doctor is AI Forget that we cannot trust self-driving cars and that those flying ones we were promised remain elusive. Two random items this morning reinforce concerns about AI. This one: Followed by this one: Science is an imperfect process, the Hill opinion notes. “Since 1980, more than 40,000 scientific publications have been retracted. They either contained errors, were based on outdated knowledge or were outright frauds.” The problem is that those zombie studies do not disappear simply because they’ve been retrcated. They continue to be cited “unwittingly“: Just by citing a zombie publication, new research becomes infected: A single unreliable citation can threaten the reliability of the research that cites it, and that infection can cascade, spreading across hundreds of papers. A 2019 paper on childhood cancer, for example, cites 51 different retracted papers, making its research likely impossible to salvage. AI relying on undigitized medical knowledge from 1853 may seem unlikely. But relying on 40,000 retracted studies still floating around?
The future is fun! The future is fair! Some of us have learned to refrain from issuing hot takes on developing stories. Yes, sometimes it’s infuriating when the press holds back from stating the obvious. I still recall the hour or more of “we don’t know what happened yet” reporting when the Challenger exploded (1986) shortly after launch, even as TV ran and re-ran footage of the explosion and we watched the detached bosters, still firing, fly wildy across the sky. Other times, as in last week’s Canada/U.S. border crash, there is a race to sensationalize in the absence of facts. Will Bunch opens his Sunday column with an Orwell quote: “There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.” — George Orwell, 1984 The lie that the bridge crash was a terrorist attack from Canada spread before the flames from the burning Bentley subsided. First the truth: Here’s what really happened on Wednesday: A 53-year-old couple from Erie County, N.Y.
I don’t know any teacher who doesn’t think they are making classroom education nearly impossible. It is a crisis: Social media, the U.S. surgeon general wrote in an advisory this year, might be linked to the growing mental health crisis among teens. And even if this link turns out to be weaker than some recent research suggests, smartphones are undoubtedly a classroom distraction. Understandably, individual schools and school districts — in Florida, Virginia, Pennsylvania and elsewhere — are trying to crack down on smartphones. Students are required to store the devices in backpacks or lockers during classes, or to place them in magnetic locking pouches. In 2024, these efforts should go even further: Impose an outright ban on bringing cellphones to school, which parents should welcome and support. In educational settings, smartphones have an almost entirely negative impact: Educators and students alike note they can fuel cyberbullying and stifle meaningful in-person interaction. A 14-country study cited by UNESCO found that the mere presence of a mobile phone nearby was enough to distract students from learning.