Johnny McEntee, the man in charge From Jonathan Karl’s new book: In his final days in the White House, President Donald Trump tried to launch a U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan — only he wasn’t exactly the person giving the orders, according to a new book by ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl. In “Tired of Winning: Donald Trump and the End of the Grand Old Party,” excerpts of which were released in Vanity Fair on Friday, Karl reports that aide Johnny McEntee, known as Trump’s “body guy,” led a chaotic attempt to reshape the U.S. military posture abroad. The incident was first reported on by Jonathan Swan of Axios, but Karl provides significant new details.
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Japan is filled with cute critters, but these pint-sized squirrels are at the top of the list. The Japanese dwarf flying squirrel and Siberian flying squirrel are known for their big eyes, small stature, and overall adorable appearance. In fact, they’re so popular in Japan that they’re even used as the design on Sapporo’s metro card. The Japanese dwarf flying squirrel (Pteromys momonga) is only found on Japan’s Honshu and Kyushu islands. Living in sub-alpine forests and boreal evergreen forests, these nocturnal animals blend into the trees with their coloring. With their body measuring up to 20 centimeters and their tail growing up to 14 centimeters, their small size can make them hard to spot. A family of Japanese dwarf flying squirrels pic.twitter.com/eh0hIhGd7S — Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) November 7, 2023 Though the name might confuse you, these squirrels don’t fly. Instead, they use a membrane called the patagium to glide from tree to tree. Feasting on seeds, fruit, tree leaves, buds, and bark, these squirrels forage at night and spend their days tucked into the holes of trees.
Is that straight-talk enough? Joe Biden is running for president of the United States. Donald Trump is running for dictator of the former United States. That is the 2024 presidential contest in a nutshell (until someone comes up with something blunter). There is not enough bronzer in the world to conceal the pasty, combed-over remnant of a democratic republic this country will be in 2025 should enough Americans not come to their senses and dump Trump and his Christian-nationalist authoritarian cult. One thing Trump and his imitators know: repetition works. Say anything enough times and people will begin to believe it. Social proof. The left thinks facts speak for themselves and need no marketing. They’re wrong. Ask the people peddling Medicare advantage plans or Skyrizi. The press sells more soap (drugs that may be “right for you,” these days) promoting a close horse race than on covering a democracy’s slow, public descent into authoritarianism. It’s a ratings downer. Martin Niemöller is a downer. Until Trump’s goons come for your favorite news anchor. There are a few voices shouting warnings on the fringes.
Sean Casten, D-Il., lays it all out in this twitter thread: It’s hard to explain how dysfunctional the @HouseGOP is, and the degree to which their own internal divisions are superseding every normal function of government. But I’m going to try with a short story about this week in the house. Thread: 1. First: We operate on a 9/30 fiscal year but the (McCarthy) led house couldn’t agree on how to fund prior to. They tried to just say “cut everything by 30%”. That didn’t pass. So they said “let’s just fund at current levels for 45 days”. That cost McCarthy his job. 2. For context, when Dems had the majority we got all our appropriations done by August 1 so the Senate could finalize and POTUS could sign. @HouseGOP still hasn’t done that. @HouseGOP 3. Also, you may recall this summer the @HouseGOP threatened to default on US debt unless we agreed to future spending rules. A deal was struck that passed the House and was signed into law to do so. The 30% cut was not consistent with that law. (AKA, it was illegal) @HouseGOP 4.
“I am so tired of these psychos” Maybe Americans are getting a clue. Maybe they are waking up, if not in the way wingnuts and QAnons think they should. The results of the last few elections suggest that, as Jamelle Bouie writes, the right’s culture war shtick — from “parental rights” to book bans to “critical race theory” to transgender kids and ad nauseum freakouts over drag shows — has finally worn thin (New York Times): If the results of Tuesday’s elections in Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio tell us anything, however, it’s that this post-Roe form of culture warring is an abject failure, an approach that repels and alienates voters far more than it appeals to or persuades them. It certainly turned off voters to Moms for Liberty. They got their asses handed to them in school board races in Iowa on Tuesday.
He will do it regardless. There is no doubt.
Marge continues to make friends and influence people I knew girls like her in high school. They all became criminals: After Rep. Lauren Boebert helped get Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene kicked out of the House Freedom Caucus over the summer, Greene has been on a payback mission against her former friend-turned-nemesis. And after a date at Beetlejuice The Musical turned into a national conversation about groping, Greene has resorted to a playbook familiar to any woman who survived high school: She’s telling GOP colleagues, according to lawmakers, that Boebert is a “whore.” One Republican lawmaker, who has heard Greene use that word multiple times to describe Boebert, told The Daily Beast that Greene has been at this campaign for some time. “Calling her a whore, that’s not new,” this GOP lawmaker said.
“When in the history of the world have the people banning books been the good guys?” Erin Reed (Erin in the Morning) posts on Threads: This story got drowned out by the elections yesterday, but I want to make it clear to everyone. A decent sized city in Tennessee has banned public homosexuality. This is the kind of law we have not seen since the 70s. It’s straight out of Orbán and Putin’s government. Now Murfreesboro has moved on to local libraries “where at least four books, all containing LGBTQ+ themes, have been pulled from the shelves,” Reed writes, describing the ordinance. “Following that, the [city] council moved to enact a tiered library card system, where most nonfiction content will be gated behind the adult-only library card. This system will go into effect in 2024.” Where have we seen that before? Reed continues: On Monday, however, the county steering committee met to discuss a new resolution: the removal of all books in the library that could possibly violate the Murfreesboro ordinance.
By hook and by crook It’s not clear sometines whether the beleaguered 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) is as dead as a Norwegian Blue or just resting. The Act, explains Democracy Docket, was not just intended to address open discrimination, but the subtle kind as well, as Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in 1969. Chief Justice John Roberts will go down in history for eviscerating and/or weakening VRA provisions. Even then, The VRA is not quite dead yet: Over the past few months, pro-voting forces have brought a series of lawsuits under lesser known and rarely litigated provisions of the VRA that seek to combat some of the more “subtle” — but nevertheless pernicious — voting laws that disenfranchise citizens across the country. From Washington to North Carolina and other states in between, these lawsuits are tapping into more obscure portions of the VRA in order to protect voting rights. You go to war with the VRA provisions you have.
The polls are driving them crazy but the performance on Tuesday should make them keep their heads down, do the work and recognize they have a good argument and all the other side has is hate. Ron Brownstein on the election this week and what it means for Democrats: Democrats yesterday continued to perform better at the polls than in the polls. Even as many Democrats have been driven to a near panic by a succession of recent polls showing President Joe Biden’s extreme vulnerability, the party in yesterday’s elections swept almost all the most closely watched contests. Democrats won the Kentucky governorship by a comfortable margin, romped to a lopsided victory in an Ohio ballot initiative ensuring abortion rights,and easily captured an open Pennsylvania Supreme Court seat. Most impressive, Democratsheld the Virginia state Senate and were projected to regain control of the Virginia state House, despite an all-out campaign from Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin to win both chambers.Among the major contests, Democrats fell short only in the governor’s race in Mississippi.