This is just ridiculous: Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie on Sunday sought to play down the potential consequences if rival Donald Trump loses the 2024 primary race but refuses to concede — or even keeps running as a third-party candidate. “No one will expect him to concede. He hasn’t conceded the 2020 election. Who cares,” Christie, a former governor of New Jersey and a Trump supporter-turned-critic, told ABC “This Week” co-anchor Jonathan Karl. While Trump maintains a huge lead in national polling of Republican primary voters, he is in a slightly weaker front-runner position according to surveys in Iowa and New Hampshire, the first two states to vote, where Christie and other challengers are hoping for an upset. Pressed by Karl on how Trump’s continued presence in the race could be an ongoing problem if he loses — like if he contests the results or runs third-party — Christie dismissed that notion, arguing that at that point, “the public en masse will begin to ignore” the former president because of his repeated defeats at the ballot box.
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The influential Spanish language broadcaster isn’t kowtowing to the boss or to Trump The Washington Post reports: The most prominent U.S. journalist at Univision, the country’s largest Spanish-language network, wrote Saturday that reporters had a moral obligation to ask hard questions of Donald Trump during his campaign to retake the White House. Jorge Ramos devoted his weekly column to making that case in the wake of his network’s recent friendly interview with Trump, which was attended by three senior executives at Univision’s relatively new parent company. Ramos wrote that it had “put in doubt the independence of our news department.” The column by Ramos, an influential anchor of Univision News since 1986, goes to 40 U.S. and Latin American newspapers, and he speaks on Univision Radio and other television shows. His most recent column, headlined “The Danger of Not Confronting Trump,” addressed the recent interview and recounted the ex-president’s separation of immigrant families and lies, including that he won the 2020 election.
They got power… This interview with Tim Alberta is riveting. Highly recommend: This is one of the most disturbing stories in American politics and there are a lot of them. We need to pay attention.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro agrees with me: Josh Shapiro isn’t yet worried about President Joe Biden’s standing. Rather, the governor of Pennsylvania attributes Biden’s recent polling slide behind former President Donald Trump to voter “brain fog” that he thinks will clear once the general election cycle kicks into gear. “I’m not sure folks remember just how chaotic it was, how divisive it was, how he was just in your face in your living room every day,” Shapiro said, referring to Trump. “I don’t think people want to go back to that.” […] “As people are reminded of what it was like and they are forced to tune back in and listen to that during the course of a presidential race, they’re going to reject his extremism, his chaos and his danger,” he said of Trump. I think he’s right. (I hope he’s right?) But it’s going to take effort to remind people about what it was really like. There is a lot to work with so there’s no excuse for failing to do it.
There is no end to the corruption. The NY Times with an epic tale of pardon abuse: Even amid the uproar over President Donald J. Trump’s freewheeling use of his pardon powers at the end of his term, one commutation stood out. Jonathan Braun of New York had served just two and a half years of a decade-long sentence for running a massive marijuana ring, when Mr. Trump, at 12:51 a.m. on his last day in office, announced he would be freed. Mr. Braun was, to say the least, an unusual candidate for clemency. A Staten Islander with a history of violent threats, Mr. Braun had told a rabbi who owed him money: “I am going to make you bleed.” Mr. Braun’s family had told confidants they were willing to spend millions of dollars to get him out of prison. At the time, Mr. Trump’s own Justice Department and federal regulators, as well as New York state authorities, were still after him for his role in an entirely separate matter: his work as a predatory lender, making what judges later found were fraudulent and usurious loans to cash-strapped small businesses. Nearly three years later, the consequences of Mr.
Some are gospel, others mere suggestions It helps that the Second Amendment has a powerful manufacturing lobby behind it. It helps that the press, churches, and the ACLU stand behind the First. Case after case has reached the U.S. Supreme Court about those. The problem, of course, is that other, better-funded conservative advocacy groups exist to make application of the Constitution’s provisions as selective as possible as Frank Wilhoit so adroitly observed, if only by implication. Poor little 14th Amendment. It’s long as amendments go (the longest). Maybe that’s why its application has been so contested and/or ignored. Too long to read? Or perhaps too radical to enforce. Sherrilyn Ifill writes in the Washington Post: I use the word “radical” deliberately. The 14th Amendment was conceived of and pushed by the “Radical Republicans” in Congress after the Civil War. They were so named because of their commitment to eradicating slavery and its vestiges from American political life.
Seems a better use of our energies “You don’t get a lot of chances to correct history’s mistakes. You get a few. And when you get them, you damn sure better take advantage of them,” said environmental historian Dan Flores. He wasn’t talking about consigning the MAGA movement to the ash heap of history. He was talking about efforts to restore bison herds on the Great Plains: In 1805, when the Lewis and Clark expedition reached the border of what is now North Dakota and Montana, they found herds of American buffalo so numerous, “the whole face of the country was covered” by them, Meriwether Lewis wrote. Less than a century later, in 1889, the nation’s most majestic animal (whose scientific name is Bison bison) had been reduced from practically uncountable numbers to an easily countable 541, and the species teetered on the edge of extinction. Today their numbers stand at about 350,000, most raised as livestock. Only 20,000 of them are protected in federal and state preserves in what are called conservation herds.
Thank you Philip Bump for this perfectly illustrated explanation of the question of life expectancy which I have tried to explain to people to no avail. For some reason this concept seems to be hard for some people to accept: One day recently, three old friends met to play pickleball. Alan, 85, had taken up the sport first. Over time, he compelled his old college acquaintances Bob, 80, and Don, 75, to join him, in keeping with the rapidly growing sport’s slow downward trend in the median age of its participants. On this day, though, Bob was preoccupied. “Does it ever bother you guys,” he asked, as they were warming up, “that each of us is above the average life expectancy in the U.S.?” Bob, you see, was well-versed in government data, in part thanks to his willingness to indulge in the natural human inclination to want to understand and explore numbers. And Bob was right. The most recent estimates compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for the year 2021, put American life expectancy at just over 76 years of age.
Looks like it… Ed Kilgore on the latest: Until recently, Democrats’ biggest concern about the 2024 youth vote was that millennial and Gen-Z voters were so disappointed with our octogenarian president that they might not turn out in great enough numbers to reelect Joe Biden. Young voters were, after all, the largest and most rapidly growing segment of the Democratic base in the last election. But now public-opinion surveys are beginning to unveil a far more terrifying possibility: Donald Trump could carry the youth vote next year. And even if that threat is exaggerated or reversible, it’s increasingly clear that “the kids” may be swing voters, not unenthusiastic Democratic base voters who can be frightened into turning out by the prospect of Trump’s return. NBC News reports it’s a polling trend that cannot be ignored or dismissed: The latest national NBC News poll finds President Joe Biden trailing former President Donald Trump among young voters ages 18 to 34 — with Trump getting support from 46% of these young voters and Biden getting 42%.
In all senses of the word Via Axios: Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) said Friday he won’t resign from Congress but acknowledged he will likely be expelled as he lobbed salacious accusations at colleagues and called the chair of the Ethics Committee a “p***y”. A growing number of lawmakers in both parties who previously voted against expelling Santos have flipped and now say they will vote to remove him following an explosive Ethics Committee report. Santos said he knows he is “going to get expelled when this expulsion resolution goes to the floor,” adding: “I’ve done the math over and over, and it doesn’t look really good.” In an X space hosted by journalist Monica Matthews, Santos said he is “not going to resign” because “[if] I resign, I admit everything that’s on that report.” Santos said he will defend himself “to the end of time,” criticizing the Ethics Committee probe as biased and goading Chair Michael Guest (R-Miss.) to “stop being a p***y” and force a vote on his expulsion resolution. Rep.