New CNN poll: Former President Donald Trump continues to hold what has proven to be an unshakeable position atop the Republican field of candidates vying to take on President Joe Biden next year, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS. Trump is the top choice for his party’s nomination at the traditional Labor Day start to a more engaged campaign season, ahead of his nearest rival by more than 30 percentage points (52% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independent voters support him, compared with 18% behind Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis). And Trump is broadly seen as best able to handle a wide range of issues. More than 4 in 10 in the potential GOP primary electorate say they have definitely decided to support him for the nomination (43% are definite Trump backers, 20% are firmly behind another candidate, and 37% have no first choice or say they could change their minds). Nearly two-thirds consider him one of their top two choices, and 61% say they think he is extremely or very likely to become the party’s nominee, up from 52% at the start of the summer.
Uncategorized
I wrote about this for Salon a couple of weeks ago. Here’s Dan Pfeiffer: Last Sunday, Speaker Kevin McCarthy went on Fox News to preview the launch of an inquiry. Here’s what he told Maria Bartiromo: Neither McCarthy nor the other MAGA Republicans chomping at the bit on impeachment can point to a single piece of evidence that President Biden had any involvement in Hunter Biden’s business dealings. This lack of evidence comes after a five-year Justice Department investigation by a Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney and 18 months of investigation by the Republican House. For some reason, this story has been getting limited attention from the political media. An impeachment inquiry into Biden is significant both in terms of the current politics and historical precedent. Biden would be the Xth President in U.S. history to face an impeachment inquiry, but the first to suffer through the process absent a modicum of evidence of wrongdoing. This potential impeachment inquiry is a direct result of Kevin McCarthy’s weakness, cowardice, and strategic idiocy. In the long history of dumb things done by Republicans, this might be the dumbest. 1.
McConnell and his Kentucky cronies tried to game the system and there’s no reason why Beshear shouldn’t turn Mitch’s clever little gambit right back on him. After Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) experienced his second freezing episode in five weeks, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear (D) is decliningto say whether he would follow a state law requiring him to appoint a Republican in the event of a Senate vacancy. A reporter asked Beshear on Thursday whether, if McConnell were to step down, he would choose a replacement from one of three nominees selected by the state Republican Party, as the statute requires. “There is no Senate vacancy,” Beshear responded at the news conference. “Senator McConnell has said he’s going to serve out his term, and I believe him, so I’m not going to speculate about something that hasn’t happened and isn’t going to happen.” Asked whether voters deserve to know his stance on the issue, Beshear said he would not “sensationalize” McConnell’s health. Heh. Good one.
He loved to dress up. Now he’ll be wearing a different costume: Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, former leader of the right-wing extremist group Proud Boys, was sentenced on Wednesday to 22 years in prison for his role in the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. Why it matters: Tarrio’s sentencing caps one of the highest-profile prosecutions related to the Capitol riot, and his isthe longest sentence handed down in the Jan. 6 cases. The previous highest sentencing record related to Jan. 6 was held by Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, who was sentenced to 18 years in prison in May. Of note: Prosecutors had sought a 33-year sentence for Tarrio. Flashback: Tarrio was found guilty in May of seditious conspiracy related to Jan. 6, alongside other Proud Boys members. Tarrio wasn’t at the Jan. 6 Capitol Riot because he was arrested days earlier for vandalizing a Black Lives Matter banner at a historic Black church in D.C. in 2020.
The demagogue liar Vivek is the future of the GOP, god help us. But AOC is the future of the Dems — and they are very lucky to have her: Ocasio-Cortez, who at 29 became the youngest woman and youngest Latina to serve in the House of Representatives, is now 33, twice re-elected and comfortable in her political skin. She could hardly be described as an old hand but nor does she channel the shock of the new. She deploys social media with enviable authenticity; she grills congressional witnesses like a seasoned interrogator; she is an object of perverse fascination for Fox News and rightwing trolls; she has been around Washington long enough to draw charges of “co-option” and “selling out”. “AOC Is Just a Regular Old Democrat Now,” ran a headline on New York magazine’s Intelligencer website in July.
I’m not going to go into why that is a load of bullshit. The economy hummed along, no thanks to him but rather the recovery from 2008 finally reaching its stride. Our relationship with the world was nearing catastrophic. The border was a nightmare under him. We were still mired in Afghanistan and every day was some kind of chaotic catastrophe because this miscreant didn’t know what he was doing. This really takes some chutzpah: Not really. There are many more jobs now, manufacturing is coming back and the world is no longer terrified that the president is going to do something really stupid. But really, let’s take a look at where we were exactly three years ago today, shall we? When the pandemic hit he and his band of losers couldn’t even get masks and gowns to NY City while the morgues were filling up because he put his son-in-law in charge of “logistics” and he was clueless. Trump, meanwhile, was saying it was no big deal and if we got it we should take snake oil cures and inject disinfectant. On September 3, 2020: Trump’s answer to all that? On September 3, 2020 he had a rally in Pennsylvania.
Put up or shut up Holding firm to one’s convictions and principles is easy when they are not being tested. Thomas Paine spoke of it eloquently in December of 1776: “THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.” We live in such times again. We’ve simply traded Redcoats for red hats. We watched the latter sack the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, ,2021 in service to a man and a movement that rejects the principles for which Paine and the Continental Army fought.
Of loss and Labor day and cultural shifts On Labor Day 2023, I’m thinking about the town of Canton, NC, just west of here. Their 100-plus year-old paper mill abruptly closed this year throwing over 1,000 workers out of their jobs. The mill was the town’s life’s blood. Now it’s gone. The city obtained the shift whistle from the mill as a reminder of the sounds that marked the days there for decades. People gathered downtown earlier this year to shed tears as the whistle blew for the last time. “This is not just 1,300 jobs; this is our blue-collar identity,” said Canton Mayor Zeb Smathers. Gov. Roy Cooper has pledged millions in support for the region’s displaced workers. Canton was also one of the few outposts of labor unions in the region. In March, Smathers told the Carolina Journal: “We’ve had a death in the family,” he said. “I had a mill worker tell me that. That’s exactly what it is and exactly what it feels like. Like a death, you just experience the numbness and shock of a sudden loss and that’s what happened out of the blue. I had to call the governor’s office and let them know.
Nor their cultural blemishes Predictions of calamity always attend change, be it cultural, economic or political. Preachers love to associate natural catastrophes with God’s judgement against unbelievers (until the storms and floods strike their own communities). Somehow, change always seems to bring out the doomsayer in us. So, it’s interesting that as church attendance declines, former churchgoers still maintain their sense of morality despite theocrats’ claims that that’s not possible. Daniel K. Williams writes in The Atlantic that, if nothing else, people shedding their churchgoing identities does not means losing their moral and political ones: So, as church attendance declines even in the southern Bible Belt and the rural Midwest, history might seem to suggest that those regions will become more secular, more supportive of abortion and LGBTQ rights, and more liberal in their voting patterns. But that is not what is happening. Declines in church attendance have made the rural Republican regions of the country even more Republican and—perhaps most surprising—more stridently Christian nationalist.
Outside the California State Capitol last month, a fitness trainer turned school board president fired up the crowd at a parental rights rally, telling them they were all fighters in “a spiritual battle” for their kids and must answer the call from God. Sonja Shaw, who was elected to the Chino Valley Unified School District board of education last November with an assist from a local megachurch and its Christian nationalist pastor, didn’t equivocate in naming the enemy: state Democratic officials who are challenging her right-leaning policies—and drafting laws that hinder book bans and protect teachers from harassment. “Today we stand here and declare in his almighty name that it’s only a matter of time before we take your seats and we be a God-fearing example to the nation, how God is using California to lead the way,” Shaw crowed, adding, “We already know who has won this battle. You will be removed in Jesus’s name!