And the other one has always been intellectually and morally challenged. Now….? The networks don’t seem to realize this. Or they don’t care: In the week following President Joe Biden’s April campaign launch, CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC continuously emphasized Biden’s age, mentioning it 588 times, while mentioning former President Donald Trump’s age only 72 times. On April 25, Biden announced his reelection bid for 2024. Biden, largely focused on campaigning to protect “freedoms” against “MAGA extremism,” has long dealt with right-wing criticism of his age. In the week following his campaign announcement, Biden’s age and mental “fitness” were repeatedly topics of conversation across cable news. CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC often described Biden’s age as his campaign’s biggest hurdle.
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Cutting Medicare and SS is in their DNA I’m sure you remember that moment. [S]etting aside the noteworthy yet individual promises from Republican politicians, earlier this year, in a quick-witted maneuver, President Joe Biden got dozens of Republicans to collectively agree they would not cut funding for Medicare or Social Security during his State of the Union speec “Instead of making the wealthy pay their fair share, some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset. I’m not saying it’s the majority,” Biden said. Republicans quickly cut him off with shouts of “No!,” coupled with visible head shakes and thumbs downs. Your favorite heckler Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) even stood up to shout, “Liar!” at Biden. He continued, going off script,“So folks, as we all apparently agree, Social Security and Medicare is off the books now, right?” Republicans began applauding in response to his question. “Alright, we got unanimity!” Biden replied.
Norms are values systems Left, right. Liberal, conservative. We reflexively map out political morphology in America as dichotomies. Us, them. Urban, rural. The problem the country faces as tensions build across the modern political divide is that the framework of the United States of America, flaws and all, is built upon a set of values the framers shared: self-evident truths, unalienable rights, a government built to promote justice, domestic tranquility, the general welfare, etc. Even then, agreement was not universal. The colonies were home to federalists and antifederalists, slave states and free, colonial rebels and Tories/Royalists. Dahlia Lithwick and Michael Podhorzer imply that it was always thus, that the greater “We the People” never really shared those values, the same truths, or else did not view them the same way. How left and right view governance today reflects the same contrasts. Donald Trump saw the Department of Justice as “his” to deploy against enemies. Joe Biden left the prosecutor investigating his own son in place.
Are we wired to see it that way? Adam Mastroianni’s surveys may explain our persistent gloominess (New York Times): Two well-established psychological phenomena could combine to produce this illusion of moral decline. First, there’s biased exposure: People predominantly encounter and pay attention to negative information about others — mischief and misdeeds make the news and dominate our conversations. Second, there’s biased memory: The negativity of negative information fades faster than the positivity of positive information. Getting dumped, for instance, hurts in the moment, but as you rationalize, reframe and distance yourself from the memory, the sting fades. The memory of meeting your current spouse, on the other hand, probably still makes you smile. When you put these two cognitive mechanisms together, you can create an illusion of decline. Thanks to biased exposure, things look bad every day. But thanks to biased memory, when you think back to yesterday, you don’t remember things being so bad. When you’re standing in a wasteland but remember a wonderland, the only reasonable conclusion is that things have gotten worse.
Meanwhile, the “Trump Crime Family” keeps on criming Something real finally happened in the Hunter Biden saga besides all the innuendo and gossip that has had the right wing in a permanent state of titillation and excitement for the past few years. Yesterday morning he was charged with three crimes. U.S. Attorney David Weiss, (a Trump appointee who the former president was very proud to nominate saying he “shares the President’s vision ”) released a letter laying out the charges: The first Information charges the defendant with tax offenses—namely, two counts of willful failure to pay federal income tax, in violation of 26 U.S.C. § 7203. The defendant has agreed to plead guilty to both counts of the tax Information. The second Information charges the defendant with a firearm offense—namely, one count of possession of a firearm by a person who is an unlawful user of or addicted to a controlled substance, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3) and 924(a)(2) (2018). The defendant has agreed to enter a Pretrial Diversion Agreement with respect to the firearm Information.
It’s not pretty. Not pretty at all.
If a Republican get into the White House we’re going to find out Semafor (subsc. only)reports on Trump’s latest “policy” announcement: Donald Trump unveiled another sweeping piece of his plans to slash federal spending and defund the “deep state” on Tuesday, effectively claiming vast, unchecked powers to shape the government. In a new video, first shared with Semafor, the former president vowed to scrap pieces of the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, the once obscure federal law he was accused of violating when he froze funding Congress had earmarked for Ukraine. That move helped lead to his first impeachment. The statute forces the executive branch to spend money Congress approves. But it also puts in place rules governing how the president can delay — or “impound” — federal funding for specific programs, or permanently rescind cash from them with permission from lawmakers. Congress passed it after President Richard Nixon attempted to scrap tens of billions in federal spending on his own, in what was widely seen as an abuse of his powers.
Will the new anti-abortion tactics work? They want a total national ban, don’t kid yourself. But they’ve always been willing to do it incrementally. Now that they have succeeded in overturning Roe and “returning it to the states” they’re moving simultaneously to push full bans where they can get it and a so-called “moderate” ban for all the states where it is currently legal. It’s diabolical: A key anti-abortion group is pushing to get Republicans singing from the same songbook a year after the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade damaged the party’s national political prospects. Citing a new round of national polling the group commissioned, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America argues in a new memo, obtained by Semafor, that many Americans are comfortable limiting access to abortions even if they consider themselves broadly “pro-choice.” It’s part of an effort to convince Republicans to go on offense with an issue that many believe played a role in the party’s disappointing midterms performance, and get them to at least back a national ban on abortions after 15 weeks.
Following up on the post below here’s a pro-choice tactic that should tie the other side up in knots: Revs. Jan Barnes and Krista Taves have logged hundreds of hours standing outside abortion clinics across Missouri and Illinois, going back to the mid-1980s. But unlike other clergy members around the country, they never pleaded with patients to turn back. The sight of the two women in clerical collars holding up messages of love and support for people terminating a pregnancy “so infuriated the anti-abortion protesters that they would heap abuse on us and it drew the abuse away from the women,” recalled Taves, a minister at Eliot Unitarian Chapel in Kirkwood, Missouri, as she sat on a couch at Barnes’ stately church in this quiet suburb of St. Louis. “I thought: ‘Whoa, these people really are not messing around.’ But then I thought, ‘Well, I’m not messing around either.’” So when Missouri’s abortion ban took effect after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, Barnes and Taves decided to fight back.
Look at Texas, Florida, and Arizona compared to the West Coast cities. Just sayin’