I suspect it will when all is said and done. The union movement’s ascendance in the last couple of years is extremely important and I just hope that the union members who benefit from it will remember who their enemies are — and their friends.
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Maybe, maybe not. I’m not happy about No Labels. for obvious reasons. First, they are nothing but a sabotage operation designed to stop the Democrats from winning the presidency in 2024. Joe Lieberman is one of their leaders. They aren’t trying to hide it. The question is whether or not it would turn out the way they think it will. Since Manchin is (nominally) a Democrat I think most of us assume it would hurt Biden. But Michael Tomasky has a different idea: Everybody is in a tizzy about Joe Manchin’s retirement announcement. And maybe they should be. The conventional wisdom for months, or even for a couple years, has been that a presidential candidacy by the West Virginia senator under the “centrist” No Labels banner would mean the end for Joe Biden, and that’s the take in most of the insta-analyses I’ve read over the last 24 hours. It’s also what I’ve always thought, and it stands to reason. Not because Manchin is a Democrat. But because it has been assumed that he splits the anti-Trump vote.
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.
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.