The perennial question The Faye Dunaway character in “Network” explained Howard Beale’s popularity: “The American people are turning sullen. They’ve been clobbered on all sides by Vietnam, Watergate, the inflation, the depression; they’ve turned off, shot up, and they’ve fucked themselves limp, and nothing helps. The American people want somebody to articulate their rage for them.” Is Trump just Howard Beale? It’s as good an explanation as anything, I guess. But remember, Howard Beale was certifiably nuts. The man is a disgraceful pig. His antics on the witness stand today were beyond outrageous. Lisa Rubin on NBC describes his testimony as “someone who was not in control of his id today.” He’s not in control of his id any day. And yet, he is leading in the battleground states right now because Joe Biden is old and foolish people have bought into his hype that he personally made the economy perfect when he was in office. (It wasn’t, they just have short memories.) It’s infuriating.
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Grabier than “Gollum reaching for the One Ring” Filing for the 2024 elections in North Carolina opens in four weeks: at noon on Monday, Dec. 4. Democrats are already in court fighting the usual tricksy maneuvers from the Republican legislature. State Republicans roll their eyes and complain bitterly that Democrats filing lawsuits is more of the same tiresome resistance to their gerrymandered majorities. Naturally, Democrats would not be expending campaign resources on court so often if the GOP was not so routinely engaged in voter disenfranchisement and power grabs. Their latest is a doozy. After Democrat Roy Cooper defeated incumbent Pat McCrory (of HB2 “bathroom bill” fame) in the 2016 election for governor, Republicans called a lame-duck session ostensibly to address hurricane relief. What they really had in mind was changing the composition of election boards and stripping the incoming governor of appointment powers before he could take office.
Then plan carefully This horror story from Florida (where else?) should give anyone pause who lives alone away from relations “as 3 out of 5 Americans in their 80s do.” Or if you have a family member who does (Washington Post): When Douglas Hulse pulled his Ford Mustang convertible into a Florida gas station three years ago, he looked so distressed that someone called 911. An ambulance rushed him to Orlando Health South Seminole Hospital, where doctors said he had a stroke. At 80, the retired pilot who had flown famous passengers around the country could no longer care for himself. […] A hospital can be liable if a patient is discharged into an unsafe environment. Because Hulse lived alone and the hospital officials saw no sign that he had family, that put them in a bind when his health didn’t improve. So they argued in court that he was no longer capable of making his own decisions and needed a guardian — a caretaker with enormous legal power. Medicare “pays the hospital by diagnosis, not length of stay,” so when Hulse started costing the hospital money, they quickly washed their hands of him.
Don’t panic. Look to the Double Haters This poll is giving everyone a heart attack today and driving all the news. The media is downright gleeful. Fun for them! President Biden is trailing Donald J. Trump in five of the six most important battleground states one year before the 2024 election, suffering from enormous doubts about his age and deep dissatisfaction over his handling of the economy and a host of other issues, new polls by The New York Times and Siena College have found. The results show Mr. Biden losing to Mr. Trump, his likeliest Republican rival, by margins of three to 10 percentage points among registered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania. Mr. Biden is ahead only in Wisconsin, by two percentage points, the poll found. Margins are calculated using unrounded figures. Nevada+10 rep Biden 41% Trump 52 Georgia+6 rep Biden 43% Trump 49 Arizona+5 rep Biden 44% Trump 49 Michigan+5 rep Biden 43% Trump 48 Pennsylvania+4 rep Biden 44% Trump 48 Wisconsin+2 dem Biden 47% Trump 45 Based on New York Times/Siena College polls of 3,662 registered voters from Oct. 22 to Nov. 3 Across the six battlegrounds — all of which Mr.
While we all wring our hands over the NY Times Poll, I think it’s important for people to see this. Just to keep some perspective: Ladies & gentlemen, the leading Republican candidate for president. pic.twitter.com/QOiDnWa3jv — Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) November 5, 2023 We’ve become so used to these confessions. https://t.co/bsJPWE98Rp — Sherrilyn Ifill (@SIfill_) November 4, 2023 The entire GDP of Hungary is $189 billion. Annual inflation in Hungary is around 20 percent. Orban is an authoritarian. Hungary does not border Russia no matter how many times Trump keeps saying it does in every speech he gives where he praises Orban. https://t.co/IHbZw0Uu9A — Ben Meiselas (@meiselasb) November 4, 2023 Trump: And we will together restore law and order in our country. We will completely overhaul the doj to investigate every marxist prosecutor in America for their illegal racist in the reverse enforcement.. pic.twitter.com/eftLSe9vX5 — Acyn (@Acyn) November 4, 2023 Trump: And when you think of it how important elections are, you have millions of people alive right now if the election was not rigged. They would be alive.
A Bigger We keeps winning The last four minutes of this Giridharadas dialogue mentioned on Friday is worth four of your minutes. The left must stop playing defense. We’re winning fights that matter. We are endeavoring to do a really cool thing in this country, which is to build a country made of the world, a country made of all the other countries…. We are trying to build a country where every kind of person from every last village on this planet can come here and realize more of their potential than they would have wherever they came from. We don’t live up to it a lot, but it is an awesome pursuit. Tell the story of what we’re fighting for.
On Friday afternoon, New York County Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron expanded his gag order in the Trump Organization fraud case. He made clear again that, in essence, he would not stand for any more of Trump’s or his lawyers’ attempts at intimidation via social media or verbal diarrhea: “The threat of, and actual, violence resulting from heated political rhetoric is well-documented,” Engoron wrote. “Since the commencement of this bench trial, my chambers have been inundated with hundreds of harassing and threatening phone calls, voicemails, emails, letters, and packages. The First Amendment right of defendants and their attorneys to comment on my staff is far and away outweighed by the need to protect them from threats and physical harm.” On Oct. 3, 2023, Engoron imposed a gag order narrowly barring Trump from making statements about his staff after he smeared the judge’s law clerk on Truth Social. The order did not prevent Trump from making any statements about the judge or New York Attorney General Letitia James, who brought the lawsuit threatening the former president’s business empire.
And listen Michelle Goldberg on “the argument.” It’s not an easy topic and she does a very good job of sorting it out: Last week, the Anti-Defamation League and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law sent a letter to nearly 200 college presidents urging them to investigate campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine for potential violations of federal and state laws against providing material support to terrorism. As evidence for these very serious accusations, the ADL and the Brandeis center offered only the student group’s own strident rhetoric, including a sentence in its online tool kit, which praised Hamas’s attacks on Israel and said: “We must act as part of this movement. All of our efforts continue the work and resistance of the Palestinians on the ground.” Under the direction of Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida has also ordered state universities to shut chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine.
He knows how to fail When Mike Johnson tried to start a law school it didn’t go well: In February 2012, Mike Johnson sent an aide on an urgent mission at the college where he had been working to open a law school: Locate a study that he believed would provethe project was financially possible. For more than a year, Johnson — the dean of the not-yet-opened law school — had been telling donors and the public that the institution, which would focus on training Christian attorneys in northwest Louisiana, was not only achievable, but inevitable. “From a pure feasibility standpoint,” Johnson, then 38, told the local Town Talk newspaper in 2010 after becoming dean, “I’m not sure how this can fail because … it looks like the perfect storm for our law school.” But he had still not actually seen a feasibility study commissioned by the parent school, Louisiana College,a private Southern Baptist college in Pineville, La., now known as Louisiana Christian University. The aide soon returned with disturbing news: The study had been buried in a filing cabinet. And it was all but useless.
But this looks promising Simon Rosenberg, who called the red trickle in 2022, wrote this on twitter: As folks ready their election takes for Tuesday night, it’s important to check in on the big advantages Congressional Dems have opened up in recent months. Perhaps most important polling data out there right now. Tuesday is off-year election day and because the Virginia Governor’s race overly excites the beltway press we’ll all be watching to see how the Great Whitebread hope Glenn Youngkin does. His race doesn’t really mean anything nationally but they will say it is a bellweather despite their huge miss in 2022. And whether or not this discontent with the GOP congress transaltes to other races is unknown. But it’s not good for them. And with MAGA MIke in charge it’s probably going to get worse.