Good for her: Former congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), who has vowed to do everything she can to keep Donald Trump from returning to the White House, launched a television ad Tuesday warning viewers that the former president “is a risk America can never take again.” The ad is running on CNN before and during a high-profile town hall scheduled Wednesday night on CNN featuring Trump — now a 2024 candidate — taking questions from voters in New Hampshire. The 60-second spot, which Cheney narrates but in which she does not appear, is funded by her political action committee. It recounts Trump losing the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden and lying to his followers about the results. Then, Cheney says, “he mobilized a mob to come to Washington and march on the Capitol” on Jan. 6, 2021. “Trump was warned repeatedly that his plans for January 6th were illegal,” Cheney says, as images of the Capitol being overrun are shown. “He didn’t care, and today he celebrates those who attacked our Capitol.
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Has there ever been a bigger baby? Ever??? Update: Still ranting at 1 am: He also put out two more of those whiny videos. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he was on drugs. Too many diet cokes?
He was also a Nazi We know now that he was a white supremacist incel. Here’s one of his posts on social media: It sounds like some kind of joke. (He even mentions that Hitler got Germany out of an economic recession!) But it’s not. This guy’s social media is full of stuff like this. He hits all the talking points. I hope that monster “Libs of Tik Tok” feels good about herself today. She really helped save the children last weekend.
Biden may have no choice There’s a lot of talk these days about Biden citing the 14th amendment to unilaterally lift the debt ceiling if it comes down to that. (Actually it’s just him directing the treasury dept. to pay the bills the government has incurred.) I thought you might be interested in this analysis of the subject by legal expert Garret Epps: John Perry, a wealthy patriot, boosted the American war effort in 1918 by subscribing to the Fourth Liberty Loan. For $10,000, he bought a bond payable in 1934 “in United States gold coin of the present standard of value.” By Perry’s calculation of the price of gold, that meant that in 1934 he was entitled to a payback in the value of $16,931.25. Unfortunately for Perry, U.S. dollars were no longer backed by gold in 1934, and there were no legal gold coins. Among the effects of the Great Depression was radical deflation—as money got scarcer, those who still had dollars could buy more goods and services than before the crash. So, on June 5, 1933, Congress passed a Joint Resolution declaring such “gold clauses” invalid.
If you want to understand what’s wrong with out politics, look no further than this chart YouGov survey: The only news the right fully trusts are propaganda outfits, Breitbart, The Federalist, Fox News, OAN and Newsmax. Astonishingly, more Democrats than Republicans trust right wing rags like the National Review, Washington Examiner and the Daily Caller. These people are living way down deep in the wingnut rabbit hole and they have completely lost touch with reality.
Q: When is an abortion ban not a ban? A: When it’s dressed up as a 12-week limit. “They’ve dressed this up as a 12-week ban, but it’s really not,” North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D) told CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday. The GOP-controlled legislature, suddenly with supermajorities in both houses can, with no defections, pass SB 20 over Cooper’s expected veto. “It will effectively ban many abortions altogether because of the obstacles they have created for women, for clinics, and for doctors,” Cooper told host Margaret Brennan. “This bill has nothing to do with making women safer.” No more than Republican-sponsored “election integrity” measures are about safeguarding elections. Politico: “North Carolina has become an access point in the Southeast,” he told Brennan. “And what this legislation is going to do is going to prevent many women from getting abortions at any time during their pregnancy, because of the obstructions that they had put here.
No, buying another gun won’t help When is today’s mass murder scheduled? Is there an online calendar of coming tragedies for those wishing to be elsewhere when the shooting starts? This article from the Miami Herald is a week old, but These countries have issued travel advisories for their citizens towards the United States is timely nonetheless: Due to a rise in crime and fatalities, travel advisories are not uncommon. Travel advisories are the most efficient way for officials to provide safety information to their citizens about potential risks when visiting other countries. Despite the media portrayal and opinions of others, the U.S. is not immune to travelers questioning their safety. Several countries have advised citizens to take standard safety precautions when entering the U.S., but some have increased the level of alarm. Increased hate crimes, violence, sexual assault and other forms of criminality, have countries warning their citizens about travel to the United States. Travel Noire revealed why New Zealand, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, France, Venezuela and Uruguay encourage their citizens to stay diligent when visiting America.
The man of the people who panics over stock prices An interesting article in Politico this weekend about recent events in which some left writers and thinkers extolled the virtues of Tucker Carlson because he claims to be a populist, anti-globalist. In my view, even if one were to overlook his blatant racism, misogyny and general adherence to batshit far right nonsense, you really shouldn’t overlook this when you’re taking the position that he’s a populist: “Please get her fired. It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.” That was in response to a reporter acknowledging the results of the 2020 election. His concerns were not about the working people of America. Or this. After he was fired by MSNBC: Mr. Carlson eventually snagged a pundit contract at Fox and an unpaid fellowship at the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank. But his days as a TV star seemed at an end. With four school-age children, the Carlsons sold their $4 million Washington home, and he had what he later described as a kind of meltdown.
Gun culture is killing us It was another bloody weekend in America’s sick and twisted shooting gallery. A man dressed in full tactical gear and carrying an assault rifle got out of his car at a shopping mall in Allen Texas and started randomly shooting people on the sidewalk. A police officer who was coincidentally on the scene for another call took down the shooter after he had shot 16 people, killing at least 8 and possibly more. (Several people are reportedly still in critical condition.) This is seen as a huge success story among the gun fetishists because it shows that a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun with only a dozen and half casualties. It’s what we call “good news” these days. Last week we had two other major shooting incidents before this one. One, in Atlanta, caused the whole downtown area to be shut down for hours after a man shot five women in a doctor’s office and then disappeared into the labyrinth of office buildings.
“Seizing political control of the schools is not a campaign slogan. It’s a plan to turn power into more power” The right has been attacking public education as long as anyone can remember. It’s usually about unions or dumbing down and losing to the Chinese or something like that. But as Jonathan Chait writes in this excellent article about what’s actually happening in today’s right wing assault on education, they have now decided that academic freedom is for losers — they are convinced that it’s time to completely take over American education and indoctrinate children into right wing ideology. The article is long so I’d recommend that you read it in full if you can but suffice to say that Chait makes many good points about the historical antecedents of various attempts to dominate education and points out that there are excesses on the left as well as right.