Annie Lowrey in the Atlantic had an interesting take on why so many people are unhappy in this booming economy: Dr. Dre on the radio, The Matrix on the big screen, The Sopranos on TV: The year 1999 was wonderful for many reasons, including economic ones. That year, the median household income rose to a record level, a watermark that held for nearly two decades. (The average American family was poorer when Donald Trump was running for office than when Bill Clinton left office.) Wages were growing across the board—all kinds of workers were getting consistent raises. Productivity growth was strong. Wealth inequality was holding steady and far lower than it is today. The poverty rate hit its lowest point in years. I could go on and on with the hard statistics: The share of workers with a college degree was climbing. The homeownership rate was booming. The stock market, booming. Consumer confidence was the highest it has ever been. The share of people employed was the highest it has ever been. Investor optimism was the highest it has ever been.
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It’s even worse than we knew Rolling Stone catches up with more Jason Aldean racism: JUST WHEN YOU thought there couldn’t possibly be anymore dog whistles embedded in the Jason Aldean “Try That in a Small Town” saga, an intrepid, sharp-eyed TikTok user has potentially picked out one more. Amazingly, this incident doesn’t involve the song itself, or even its controversial video — part of which was reportedly filmed outside a courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee, the site of a 1933 lynching (and features a surprising amount of footage from Canada). Rather, it involves a promotional video shared on TikTok. It’s a largely innocuous lyric video with a newspaper theme, but as TikTok user Danny Collins discovered, there’s an actual old newspaper clipping featured in the video — and it’s tied to a Jim Crow-era story about a writer who was harassed for fighting segregation and white supremacy. @dannyfcollins Thank you to my followers who tag me. All I’m saying is lets get real. To everyone supporting Jason Aldean what else do you need to see or hear? Accept accountability and do better.
This is from Axios the font of all beltway CW. It’s about time: Republicans are hammering “Joe Biden’s America” as a land of rising violent crime, surging immigration and out of control inflation, but there’s just one problem: the numbers are starting to move in the opposite direction. The big picture: With 2024 around the corner, the U.S. is making measurable progress in the areas where Biden has been most vulnerable to GOP attacks. Violent crime surged in U.S. cities during the pandemic and ranked as a top concern for voters in the 2022 midterms. Republicans slammed Biden and Democratic leaders for rising crime rates, and many Democrats started embracing a more centrist approach to policing. Homicides were down 9% in the first half of this year over the same period last year, according to a study of 37 major cities from the Council on Criminal Justice. State of play: Violent crime rates are generally down across the board, thought they’re still higher than 2019 levels.
Why small is still beautiful Tripp Narup ran for and lost a state senate seat in red, red Iowa. As a Democrat. Because the last time he’d voted in Iowa’s 9th district there was no one for him to vote for. Narup tells Salon’s Kirk Swearingen that only 17% of voters are registered Democrats in that southwest Iowa district. He tells Salon: After losing spectacularly for the Senate, I have now started a PAC to raise money to support (as yet undetermined) candidates to run for four [state] House seats and one open Senate seat. The plan is to raise $2,000 per candidate as an enticement to get someone to step up and run. Any additional money will be used to run ads pointing out the many sins of our current state senators representatives. Now this may strike you as small potatoes (these are farming districts, after all), but my whole campaign cost less than $6,000 and I paid for a third of it. “Big campaign money” around here is $10,000 or so. (In farm terms, that’s about 7 cows.) Compared to big-city politics, this is quaint and kind of endearing.
Meadows was in the thick of everything in Trump’s last year in office from the COVID mess to the Big Lie and he’s been MIA in the media since it was over. He wrote his book, which was full of some colorful details that made Trump angry and he provided a lot of emails to the January 6th Committee before clamming up. But nobody knows to what extent he’s been cooperating with the Special Counsel, not even Trump. According to reports Trumpworld is very nervous about that. According to the Washington Post, the Special Counsel is interested in him but it doesn’t sound to me as if he’s cooperating: Mark Meadows joked about the baseless claim that large numbers of votes were fraudulently cast in the names of dead people in the days before the then-White House chief of staff participated in a phone call in which then-President Trump alleged there were close to 5,000dead voters in Georgia and urged Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to overturn the 2020 election there.
They’ll never stop trying Of course: Three of Donald Trump’s rivals for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination are pushing for cuts to Social Security benefits that would only affect younger Americans, as the party’s leaders grapple with the explosive politics of the retirement program. In comments on Sunday as well as in interviews earlier this year, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said Social Security will need to be revamped — but not for people who are near or in retirement. Former vice president Mike Pence and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley have taken similar positions since launching their presidential campaigns. From the earliest days of his 2016 run, Trump has vowed not to touch either Social Security or Medicare — a break from GOP orthodoxy that has shifted the party’s views — and has more recently hammered DeSantis for wanting to cut the program. It’s in the DNA of the Republican Party to end the safety net. It just is. Trump may have temporarily taken it off the table but it will be right back on the minute he leaves the scene. I have never believed for a minute that this was a permanent change of ideology.
Ron Brownstein on the defiant red border states: A pregnant teenager writhing in pain as she suffered a miscarriage while trapped in the barbed wire that Texas has strung along miles of the state’s southern border. A 4-year-old girl collapsing from heat exhaustion after Texas National Guard members pushed her away from the wire as she tried to cross it with her family. Texas state troopers receiving orders from their superiors to deny water to migrants in triple-digit heat. Officers on another occasion ordering troopers to drive back into the Rio Grande a group of migrants, including children and babies, that they found huddling alongside a fence by the river. These are all incidents that a medic in the Texas Department of Public Safety says he witnessed during recent patrols, according to an explosive email published this week by the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News. “I believe we have stepped over a line into the in humane [sic],” the medic, Nicholas Wingate, wrote in the email.
I’m just going to leave this here. It says so much more than he knows: That man has the most popular political podcast in the country.
Florida Republicans knew that Democrats in the state who applied to vote by mail during the pandemic were new to the practice so they decided to force them to re-apply. Normally, once you apply they automatically send you a ballot for four years. Now it’s just two: Florida Democrats say they’re spending and organizing to chase down people who vote by mail after election officials across the state canceled all standing mail ballot requests this year. The mass cancellations were to comply with a 2021 election law that added new restrictions to mail-in voting. The legislation — which was celebrated by Gov. Ron DeSantis and slammed by voting rights advocates as discriminatory — cut the duration of mail-in ballot requests in half from four years to two. It also required that existing requests for mail ballots be canceled at the end of 2022, forcing election workers to cancel millions of requests and start their lists of vote-by-mail voters from scratch. In practice, that means that voters who requested mail-in ballots in 2021 or 2022 will have to make such requests again to vote in local races and the 2024 primary and general elections.
Especially Donald Trump Trump remains broadly unpopular with the public: 63% of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of the former president, while 35% view him favorably. A year ago, Trump’s rating stood at 60% unfavorable. In the new survey, 66% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents have a very or mostly favorable opinion of Trump, while 32% have a very or mostly unfavorable view of him. The share of Republicans who view Trump favorably has declined by 9 percentage points from last July, when 75% viewed him favorably and 24% viewed him unfavorably. Democrats and Democratic leaners continue to express overwhelmingly negative opinions of Trump. About nine-in-ten Democrats (91%) view Trump unfavorably, including 78% who have a very unfavorable view. Just 8% have a favorable impression. Views of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris The public’s views of four other political leaders included in the survey, including President Joe Biden, also continue to be more unfavorable than favorable. Six-in-ten Americans hold a very or mostly unfavorable opinion of Biden, while 39% view him favorably.