I would be slightly worried about this if it weren’t for the fact that RFK Jr’s constituency is a bunch of right wing anti-vax loons who would never vote for Biden anyway. It’s a sad denouement for the Kennedy legacy.
"what digby sez..."
Month: April 2023
Tester knows what he’s doing. Manchin doesn’t.
Maybe Manchin should have kept his mouth shut instead of showboating with Kyrsten Sinema. He might not have found himself in this position:
Sens. Jon Tester of Montana and Joe Manchin of West Virginia are expected to face among the toughest political environments as the Democratic Party attempts to hold the Senate next year, given that the two incumbents hail from states where President Joe Biden performed poorly against then-President Donald Trump in 2020.
But the Montanan is beginning the cycle with a huge popularity advantage, while Manchin remains among the country’s most unpopular politicians — fraught territory in the face of an expected challenge by his state’s popular Republican governor, Jim Justice, according to the Morning Consult’s latest quarterly approval ratings.
Surveys conducted between Jan. 1 and March 31 show that 58% of Montana voters approve of Tester’s job performance, making him one of America’s most popular senators. In West Virginia, Manchin’s standing appears in the inverse, with 55% of voters giving him negative marks — landing him again among America’s most unpopular senators.
Tester’s approval rating steadily improved in 2022, while Manchin’s standing plummeted after he agreed to support Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. Since then, Manchin’s approval rating has continued to decline despite his best efforts to distance himself from national Democrats.
Tester agreed to the Inflation Reduction Act too. He just didn’t present himself as a power broker to the whole country and draw attention to himself like Manchin did.
Tester’s standing in Montana
When Tester announced his plans to run for re-election in February, his campaign highlighted his support among a “broad coalition of Montanans.” Tester has honed an outsider image despite his time in Washington, placing distance between himself and the national Democratic Party.
“That’s how you run in Montana: You run essentially by yourself and are authentic,” said Bill Lombardi, Tester’s former Senate office state director.
Tester boasts a notable distinction from other vulnerable incumbent Democrats: A good chunk of the people who disapprove of Biden’s job performance approve of his.
Among the 59% of Montanans who disapprove of Biden, 42% of them give Tester positive marks. That’s above the 34% of Biden’s disapprovers in West Virginia who approve of Manchin’s job performance, or the 27% of Biden’s dislikers in Ohio who approve of Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown.
Tester’s “not an ideologue or super partisan, he’s a down to earth farmer,” Lombardi said. “He’s a populist. He’s got a libertarian streak in him.”
That helped Tester fend off a re-election challenger in the 2018 midterm elections, when he defeated now-Rep. Matt Rosendale (R) by roughly 4 percentage points. But popularity isn’t everything in electoral politics — especially in a federal race in a presidential election year. That was evidenced by Montana’s 2020 Senate race, in which the state’s popular Democratic governor at the time, Steve Bullock, suffered a double-digit loss to incumbent Republican Sen. Steve Daines.
One senior national Republican strategist suggested that a similar scenario to 2020 would play out in Montana next year, noting that in recent election cycles fewer voters of one party have supported a candidate of the other party even if they personally like them.
To beat him, Republicans are eyeing Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen or businessman Tim Sheehy, and many expect Rosendale to launch a bid. To bolster their chances of beating Tester, the Republican-controlled Montana Legislature is advancing legislation that would adopt a top-two primary system specifically for next year’s Senate contest, a move aimed at preventing a libertarian candidate from taking votes the GOP hopes would go to their eventual candidate.
Popular Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte has declined to run, instead backing Sheehy’s potential bid. Daines, who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee, could also get involved as the party works to avoid nominating someone who could hurt its chances of defeating a Democratic incumbent in a reddening state.
Manchin’s standing in West Virginia
In West Virginia, Manchin — once one of America’s most popular senators — has seen his popularity crumble, and national Republicans are hoping to recruit Justice, who is term limited, to challenge him. That contest would pit one of the country’s most unpopular incumbents against one of its most popular, according to the latest quarterly surveys.
Two in 3 West Virginia voters (66%) approve of Justice’s job performance, making him the fourth most popular governor in the country after Republican Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire and just above Kentucky’s Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, who faces re-election this fall.
A Republican source close to Justice said he is in regular contact with the party’s national campaign apparatus and is expected to soon announce a Senate bid. Justice hasn’t announced yet in part because he hopes to launch his campaign with Trump’s formal endorsement, two Republicans familiar with the matter said.
In Justice, national Republicans see a candidate who could overcome Manchin’s deep roots and political resilience as a Democrat in a dark-red state, driven in part by the governor’s enormous appeal to people who also like Manchin, whose popularity is far worse than it was at a similar point in the 2018 cycle.
“Manchin’s always a tough beat but he’s in a weaker position than ever before and will be on the ballot with Biden or whoever replaces Biden on the ticket,” said Chris Hartline, a Republican strategist and former NRSC official. “Pretty much a nightmare scenario.”
Shares of registered voters in West Virginia who approve or disapprove of Sen. Joe Manchin’s and Gov. Jim Justice’s job performance
Almost every voter who approves of Manchin’s job performance (86%) gave a thumbs up to Justice, and he boasts stronger backing from West Virginians of all political stripes, including among Democrats (52% to 49%) and independents (63% to 35%).
It wasn’t always like this for Manchin, who was one of America’s most popular senators when he was tapping the brakes on Biden’s “Build Back Better” policy agenda. It sparked a large coalitional shift that earned him high marks with Republicans and independents, but that all evaporated when he gave his decisive support to the Inflation Reduction Act in July.
Manchin has yet to announce re-election plans, sparking speculation among some that the 75-year-old might not run. But Jonathan Kott, a former aide who’s close to the Democratic senator, noted that Manchin wasn’t quick to launch a bid when he was last on the ballot in 2018 either.
“He doesn’t need to set up a campaign apparatus, he has 100% name ID and he can raise as much money as he needs as he wants,” he said. “There’s going to be a Republican primary, so why involve yourself in that?”
Indeed, a potential primary contest between Justice and Rep. Alex Mooney, who announced a Senate bid earlier this year, could be messy. If Trump does endorse Justice, it could set up a proxy fight between Republican leadership and the conservative Club for Growth, which is backing Mooney.
As Manchin watches that develop, he’s hoping his bet on the Inflation Reduction Act pays off in the long run and that Congress passes a permitting reform law that would speed approval of a planned pipeline in his home state — a hope that’s reliant on Republicans effectively doing him a favor.
“By the time the election rolls around, there’s probably going to be 10,000-15,000 new jobs created because of the Inflation Reduction Act. If he gets permitting reform done, there’ll be a pipeline that gets up and running,” Kott said. “I think all those things are pretty good campaign messages.”
He’d better hope they give him credit for it. There’s not a lot of evidence that bringing home the bacon means much in today’s politics.
Manchin is unpopular because he turned himself into the center of attention and ended up pleasing no one when the sausage making was done. The best legislators know how to play that game well and I don’t think he and Sinema do. They both would have been better off if they’d just stuck with the party and kept their heads down. But they couldn’t help themselves.
DeSantis can’t seem to get Florida officials to endorse him
He’s an ass. That’s all there is to it:
It was supposed to be RON DeSANTIS’ big day on Capitol Hill. Yet DONALD TRUMP managed to overshadow him from almost 1,000 miles away.
In the 24 hours leading up to the Florida governor’s much-anticipated meeting with GOP lawmakers, two members from his own state — Reps. JOHN RUTHERFORD and GREG STEUBE — endorsed Trump. A third Floridian — Rep. BRIAN MAST, who was once considered close with DeSantis — told CNN’s Mel Zanona that he’ll soon follow suit.
And a few hours later, in a stone-cold act of political brutality, Rep. LANCE GOODEN (R-Texas) walked out of the DeSantis meeting and declared his support for Trump.
“It’s a killer!” said one positively giddy Trump confidant, who was on the phone with Playbook when news of Gooden’s surprise endorsement broke.
To be fair, DeSantis notched a couple small victories yesterday: Freshman Rep. LAUREL LEE, his former secretary of state, endorsed him, and his Capitol Hill event — where he spoke about his state’s policy agenda, decried the “radical” Biden administration, and offered to help expand the House majority, without once mentioning Trump — drew at least three dozen lawmakers.
But at the end of the day, Trump had picked up more endorsements from Florida than DeSantis could muster with his boots on the ground in Washington.
Not only did lawmakers leave the DeSantis event without delivering their backing, our colleagues Sarah Ferris, Ally Mutnick and Burgess Everett report, but several “tried to downplay their attendance, saying they went because the governor was a former colleague and they wanted to say hello.”
INSIDE THE AMBUSH: We made some calls to Trump world last night to figure out just how much of this was coordinated. Gooden’s dramatic gesture, we’re told, came as a surprise to the former president’s brain trust. But much of the rest was quickly and carefully orchestrated over the past few days.
It began over the weekend, when Trump traveled to Nashville for the RNC donor retreat and attended a meeting arranged by Sen. BILL HAGERTY (R-Tenn.) with most of the state’s GOP congressional delegation. Trump and his team were pleasantly surprised to learn the delegation was ready and eager to endorse him — and they did.
That got Trump’s people thinking: While he’d already received the endorsements of several prominent Florida Republicans, Trump’s team wondered if others in the delegation might follow suit — just as DeSantis traveled to Capitol Hill.
So on Sunday night, Trump officials sent emails to Sunshine State members asking if they would be willing to play ball. “Heck yes, I’d love to endorse him,” one lawmaker replied. (Beyond Mast, Rutherford and Steube, other members are expected to back Trump in the coming days, we’re told.)
“The amazing part of it is how easy it was,” one person close to Trump said, noting his team was shocked, for example, that Florida Rep. BYRON DONALDS — who had introduced DeSantis and his family at the governor’s Election Night victory party — was all-in when they called him up recently.
THE STEPBACK: It’s a troubling sign for DeSantis if he can’t convince more Republican lawmakers, who know better than most how Trump can be a general-election liability. It certainly doesn’t bode well for his appeal to the common GOP voter, who probably isn’t as concerned about electability, the core of DeSantis’ pitch.
But the snub from GOP lawmakers in his home state is particularly striking, and it’s playing into the narrative that DeSantis is too aloof and inattentive to the interpersonal niceties of big-league politics.
Just ask Steube, who told Playbook in a brief interview last night that DeSantis has never once reached out to him during his five years in Congress nor replied to his multiple attempts to connect. He recalled a recent news conference dealing with damage from Hurricane Ian where the governor’s aides initially invited him to stand alongside DeSantis, only to tell him that he wouldn’t be part of the event when he showed up.
Trump, on the other hand, was the first person Steube remembers calling him in the ICU to wish him well after he was injured in a January tree-trimming accident. “To this day I have not heard from Gov. DeSantis,” he said.
Things suddenly changed last week, Steube said, as Trump started rolling out his Florida congressional backers. ”For the first time ever, I hear from DeSantis’s political person,” he said, referring to aide RYAN TYSON, who reportedly contacted other Florida Republicans about their endorsements.e leader and po
For Steube, the outreach was too little, too late. And he continues to have sharp words for DeSantis, criticizing him for his robust political travel schedule amid a busy legislative session and just months after winning a new four-year term.
“Floridians want him focused on Florida,” he said, “which is the job they elected him to do.”
For Trump everything in life is personal. The downside of that is that it makes him a terrible leader because he cares about nothing but himself. It’s a benefit as a politician because he is good at manipulating other politicians with whom he has personal relationships. He plays them well.
DeSantis, on the other hand, is a sour, nasty creep nobody can stand. Some politicians are smart or talented enough to overcome this with other skills but it does not appear that DeSantis is one of them. At least not yet. He’s off to a very rocky start, alienating people in a situation where he needs every friend he can get. Maybe he can turn this around but he was already looking at a tough uphill climb with the Trump cult still in full effect. Unless Trump drops dead on the golf course his chances are looking slimmer and slimmer.
We know who they are. We heard it in their own words
Talk about an anticlimax. For the past couple of weeks we’ve all been on tenterhooks waiting for the latest trial of the century, the defamation case by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News. The judge had already ruled that there was ample proof that Fox had lied so all Dominion had to prove was that they did it with malice (which I think we can all see every day by the venom they spew). The weeks of very juicy discovery material which had already become public, exposing the executive suite and all the top Fox stars as venal liars, were thrilling previews of what was assumed to be the main event: the prospect of all of them, including the Murdoch patriarch himself, Rupert, on the witness stand trying to explain how they could square what they said in private with what they said publicly. It led to the exciting expectation that this was going to be a long overdue comeuppance for the right-wing propaganda outlet.
Sadly, it was a dud.
Just as they had chosen a jury and were about to start opening arguments, a settlement was reached and the trial was over before it started. Dominion lawyers and executives took to the microphones and announced that they had accepted a whopping settlement offer of $787,500,000.00. Fox News issued a preposterous statement and that was the end of that:To say it was a disappointment is a massive understatement
As much as we wanted to hear about Rupert Murdoch squirming on the stand and yearned to see Tucker Carlson forced to read a statement on the air admitting that he lied repeatedly, it was always about money. Dominion got a massive payout, for which you can’t really blame them for taking. There were many legal observers who felt confident they would win the case but that their 1.2 billion dollar claim for damages was weak. For Fox, it’s just the cost of doing business. It cost a bundle but they live to lie another day and make a tidy profit doing it.
As my colleague Amanda Marcotte astutely observed, Fox News thought it had been grooming its audience for over two decades to believe everything the hosts said and it turned out that they had actually been groomed to only hear what they wanted to hear. Today’s Fox viewers are impervious to any information that conflicts with their worldview and we know this because when Fox reporters and pundits tepidly suggested that Trump’s insistence that the vote had been stolen was not borne out by the facts, Trump unleashed a primal scream and his followers lashed out hysterically, decamping to the competing networks OANN and Newsmax which were happily disseminating the Big Lie. If Fox has learned a lesson from this it’s almost certainly that they need to pay even closer attention to the jungle drums in the right-wing fever swamp — and maybe just a teensy bit more careful when they go about defaming private companies.
If the settlement had forced Fox celebrities to read a statement apologizing and admitting that they’d knowingly spread lies about the election on air, I feel confident that the viewers would not believe a word of it. There is no limit to the rationalizations MAGA true believers are capable of coming up with to justify their refusal to face reality. I might even expect Trump himself to say that it was a smart business move by Fox just to get the lawsuit out of the way. After all, he himself spent 25 million to settle the Trump University fraud lawsuit after he was elected in 2016. (And as much as he might diss Fox whenever they stray, they’ve recently come back in the fold and he is running for president.)
This case isn’t the end of the line. The other voting machine company, Smartmatic, has also filed a lawsuit asking for over $2 billion in damages. This settlement will only help their cause. Their lawyer, Erik Connolly, issued this statement after the settlement was announced:
Dominion’s litigation exposed some of the misconduct and damage caused by Fox’s disinformation campaign. Smartmatic will expose the rest. Smartmatic remains committed to clearing its name, recouping the significant damage done to the company, and holding Fox accountable for undermining democracy.
With what we already know, it does seem likely that Murdoch is going to have to write another big check. And now we see the shareholder suits coming online. The cost of doing business is getting very expensive for Fox News.
There is a silver lining for those of us who were looking for some sort of justice. The power of the paper trail that Dominion was able to obtain proved without a doubt that Fox knew that Joe Biden had won the election. They were told by many people both internally and externally that Trump was lying and there was no basis to his claims. It is now in the public record that they lie to their audience because their audience demands to be lied to and they only care about ratings and money. There are tapes and emails and text messages all proving they are what we always thought they were and we know for a fact they are not only not a news organization, they know they are not a news organization.
There really is a win for America in all this. Everything we’ve learned from the depositions and the discovery documents can’t be disappeared. The truth still matters to most of us and the truth is that Fox is not really about ideology or even sheer political power. Fox News’ mission is to entertain its audience by telling them whatever they want to hear for money. They can continue to perform for their audience, and they will, but everyone else knows what they really are: a greedy carnival act, slavering over the attention of a bunch of deluded conspiracy theorists.
I’m really surprised that no one is actively talking about what an America run by the GOP looks like. We can see it in deep red states right now, and it’s horrifying.
First, there’s the gun violence. Red states have all but abolished gun laws, and are awash in firearms. The result: lots more death, both in terms of murders and suicides. We see people randomly blowing away innocent strangers all the time.
Then there’s the death from preventable disease, maternal mortality, and infant mortality. Half of the Ob-Gyns in Idaho are gone. So are most in MS. Life expectancy in red states was low, and is plummeting. China’s life expectancy exceeds ours.
We're repealing child labor laws now. Letting them work in factories, night shifts, and bars. Given increasing wealth inequality, and low wages, more families will choose to pull kids out of school to work. More high school drop outs, and poverty cycle continues. 4/n
We’re also looking at the end of the line for the LGBT community, and particularly trans people. The laws being passed in Florida and elsewhere resemble something out of Russia or West African nations infiltrated by the religious right.
Their crusade to ban books that might tell the stories of LGBT people and Blacks has denuded entire library systems of books. Entire library systems are being closed or defunded to prevent people from having access to disfavored information. 5/n Gerrymandering and voter suppression are rampant, meaning most votes, and most election races, are meaningless: GOP politicians already picked their voters, and thereby the winner of every race. And when Dems get uppity, they get tossed.
Lack of access to birth control and abortion means more unwanted children, more poverty, worse schools (tax base issues), more child abuse, etc… The result will be more strains on already scarce social services, and even worse educational attainment. It may mean more crime.
Red states are particularly Malthusian in their views on social spending. This means that people in need of help aren’t going to get any. CPS won’t have resources. This means more homelessness, hunger, disease, and death.
Corruption among public officials will run even more rampant as the system refuses to prosecute its own. Look at Brett Favre, Clarence Thomas, and the Ohio state legislature. Money will disappear down ratholes the same way it does in Russia.
The long term picture for much of the American South is basically your average corrupt, violent, unequal, single-party, religiously conservative developing world country, complete with tropical diseases and staggering maternal and infant mortality rates.
And yet, because white Christians are on the top of the social heap there, they vote for this outcome overwhelmingly, because they see this as a better option than a pluralistic society.
Even if I’m wrong about one or two of these (and I’m almost certainly not), all of these together paint a bleak picture of what lies ahead for half the US. What blue states need to understand is that GOP controlled states will stop at nothing to make everyone just like them.
Originally tweeted by Brynn Tannehill (@BrynnTannehill) on April 18, 2023.
More accountability, please
CNN:
The Fulton County District Attorney’s office said some fake electors for Donald Trump have implicated each other in potential criminal activity and is seeking to disqualify their lawyer, according to a new court filing.
The district attorney’s office is requesting that attorney Kimberly Bourroughs Debrow be disqualified from representing a group of 10 Republicans who served as electors for the former president in Georgia – a state Trump lost to President Joe Biden. The DA’s office also accused the lawyer of failing to present an immunity deal to her clients last year, according to the filing.
The new filing offers the latest indication that immunity offers could still be in the works months after Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis suggested charging decisions were “imminent.”
Not imminent enough.
The claims of additional illegal activity by one of the fake electors comes as state prosecutors in the district attorney’s office consider asking a new grand jury to return a potentially sprawling criminal conspiracy against Trump, his top aides and the fake electors themselves.
Willis and her team could finalize their plans as soon as the end of the month and then impanel a grand jury starting in May to hear the case, according to a source familiar with the matter, though it was not clear if the latest development could delay proceedings.
Trump is seen as having two main areas of legal jeopardy in Georgia: the calls he made to officials like secretary of state Brad Raffensperger in an effort to reverse his election defeat in the weeks after the 2020 election, and his role in assembling the fake electors.
But at the heart of the investigation are the steps that Trump and his campaign aides took – knowing it was likely illegal – in assembling 16 pro-Trump electors to surreptitiously gain entry to the Georgia state capitol and submit unauthorized electoral college votes for Trump to Congress.
The special fact-finding grand jury that heard evidence for roughly seven months about Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results recently recommended more than a dozen people for indictments. Its foreperson also suggested in media interviews last month that Trump was among them.
No illusions here that criminal indictments will take Trump out of the 2024 mix, or that Trumpism would die with his presidential campaign. Trials will be delayed and delayed and delayed. But regarding Ms. Willis, as them old boys on the construction site used to say, hurry up every chance you get.
When young white women are being shot?
America today is like living in a zombie movie. Except it’s the zombies who have the guns.
Daily Beast from Tuesday night:
Four cheerleaders involved with the competitive program Woodlands Elite Cheer were in a parking lot after practice when one of them accidentally tried to get into the wrong vehicle, Bastrop County sources close to the investigation told ABC13.
According to cheerleader Heather Roth, she had just jumped out of her friend’s car when she opened the door to what she thought was her vehicle. When she saw a man on the passenger side seat, she thought a stranger had entered her car, so she got out and jumped back into the friend’s car.
The man in the vehicle then got out, approached the friend’s car, and as Roth wound down the window and began to apologize, the man “threw up his hands, pulled out a gun, and started shooting—he fired multiple shots at the group,” she said.
Roth was grazed by a bullet and treated and released at the scene. But teammate Payton Washington, 18, was hit in the leg and back.
“Payton opens the door, and she starts throwing up blood,” Roth said. Washington was flown to a nearby hospital in critical condition. Washington was born with one lung, per one account, and likely shot in it.
Police have arrested a suspect, 25-year-old Pedro Tello Rodriguez Jr.
A gunman killed Kaylin Gillis, 20, after she and some friends drove up the wrong driveway after dark in rural Washington County, New York on Saturday. Kevin Monahan allegedly opened fire on the vehicle (BBC):
Washington County Sheriff Jeffrey Murphy told CNN that Mr Monahan had “not shown any remorse in this case”.
“They were turning around, they were leaving… so there’s absolutely no reason for this man to come out on a deck and shoot at the vehicle,” he said.
Americans sacrifice their own on the Second Amendment altar day in and day out. Mass shooting after mass shooting. In shootings large and small.
We sacrifice young Black men and barely blink. We saw a young Black kid in Missouri, Ralph Yarl, 16, shot though the front door when he rang the bell of the wrong house last week while looking to pick up his younger brothers.
We saw two more kids killed and 15 others shot in Dadeville, Alabama last weekend at a Sweet 16 party. All Black, by available reports.
But when young white women are being shot and killed, will that be enough for gun-fetish America to do something about gun violence? Finally?
A wrong house, a wrong driveway, a wrong car. It could happen to any one of us as easily as rounding a corner. There, zombies await. With guns.
“Anonymous trust” is breaking down
And isn’t that fear what the extremist right is feeding the monsters daily, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes asked last night before news broke of the Texas cheerleader shootings.
“This idea that danger lurks behind every corner and the child who rang your doorbell is obviously there to murder you—this is the implicit, and sometimes explicit, message that plays constantly in right wing circles.”
Anand Giridharadas spoke to that rampant paranoia in his Substack on Tuesday morning. An Indian scholar friend had mentioned one of modern societies’ greatest achievements being — perhaps not in these exact words — “anonymous trust.”
In so many of the places our ancestors lived, all around the world, you knew a certain small number of people. And people you didn’t know were danger. People from another village: danger. People from another caste: danger. People who didn’t look like you: danger. And it’s easy to forget that the great accomplishment of so many modern societies has been to build institutions and sources of security and safety so that people don’t have to know other people personally, or know their grandmother, to trust each other. We are human, so we continue to fail at this all the time, and some groups bear the brunt of this mistrust. And yet, more often than we even think about, it works in ways that would have befuddled our forebears. We write checks to people we don’t know, share our addiction stories with people we don’t know, hire babysitters we don’t know from websites, eat semi-cooked meat and raw fish prepared by people we don’t know, live in houses engineered and built by people we don’t know, fly in planes and leap down from bungee platforms led by people we don’t personally know.
Or we did. Anonymous trust is breaking down under the daily pressure of relentless fearmongering from MAGA politicians, from the NRA, from propaganda outlets like Fox News, Newsmax, OAN, and InfoWars, and from QAnon and MAGA internet superspreaders.
We are not merely divided; we are un-developing. We are — not all of us, thankfully, but many in this country — reverting to those eras of history in which anyone outside your circle had to be murdered if they came past your moat, because the presumption was that they would destroy you if you didn’t destroy them. Reverting to the purity-and-contamination framework of caste societies: my people are not just of similar mind and values and history; they are clean and safe, and others imperil me. Reverting to people getting their information from charlatans and god men and people they happen to know, not from empirical reality. Reverting to where the default assumption many people would make about why a strange person would go up their driveway is that they are coming to attack them.
Referencing just the Missouri and New York shootings, Giridharadas continues:
In these two incidents, perhaps isolated but also emblematic, there is a certain vision of the world: Nothing and no one can be trusted, you and people like you are self-deputized law enforcers, and everyone in the world from beyond your moat is a suspect. This, I think, helps explain the spread of the thin-blue-line flag across much of the country. People aren’t just supporting the police. No one reveres anyone else that much. They are telling you that, in their own minds, they are the police. They are flying the flag of themselves.
So we are becoming a nation full of a distinct modern form of uncontacted tribes: at once hyperconnected and cut off, addled by propaganda and starved for human contact, convinced that the only good person you don’t know is a dead person you don’t know.
Another irony here — confirmation of Giridharadas’ tale — is a lesson I learned after finding a lost Great Pyrenees puppy behind the rural farmhouse we own. (The neighbors raise sheep; it was one of their dogs’ pups.) The little guy’s fast-growing head was caught in an old bed spring and wouldn’t come off. The neighbor’s wife suggested we go up the road to see if “Billy Ray” had a tool for removing it.
When we got to his house, we parked across the road from his fenced yard. (He had dogs.) She got out and instructed, “Honk the horn,” then shouted at the house, “BILLY RAY!!”
Billy Ray came outside but did not have a tool in his shed that would cut the spring steel.
Next, we rode down NC 209 to see her brother-in-law. I stopped partway up the driveway like the young girls did after dark in Washington County. She insisted I pull around back to the carport and honk the horn.
Aha! That’s the protocol. Don’t knock someone’s door out here without alerting them to your presence first (from a distance) if you don’t want them coming to the door with a shotgun.
Her brother-in-law came out the back in socks and was able to cut off the spring with a Dremel tool.
We are, as Giridharadas suggests, becoming a nation of uncontacted tribes.
Also notice that in our obsessive self-reliance and in the absence of universal health care, our first reflex in our wealthy country is to set up GoFundMe sites. Pathetic.
Here’s the latest on the debt ceiling from TPM. Sigh. This could easily go sideways. It’s a clown show. And after all, Marge Greene is the shadow speaker of the House. Kevin McCarthy is Speaker in name only:
Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has such a tenuous grip on his own conference that the debt-ceiling hostage-taking he is attempting to pull off has all the hallmarks of the bumbling kidnapping capers you see in the movies:
-The House GOP can’t agree amongst themselves what to ask for as ransom.
-They can’t get the White House to take them seriously enough as a ragtag band of kidnappers to engage in negotiations.
-They keep threatening dire consequences for not taking them seriously but are repeatedly hobbled by their own lack of consensus.
At this point, McCarthy wants the House to vote by the end of the month on a package that combines the debt ceiling with draconian spending cuts, but he clearly doesn’t have (i) internal agreement on those cuts or on how much to raise the debt ceiling by; or (ii) the votes to push a package through as early as next week.
McCarthy is preparing to bypass the House committees altogether and cobble together a package on the floor himself, Punchbowl reports. If wishing and hoping were a plan …
One word of warning: Political reporters are doing McCarthy a favor by calling what he’s presenting publicly, including in his speech yesterday to the NYSE, a “plan.” It’s not a plan yet. It skews the coverage to pretend it is a plan. McCarthy is taking advantage of this journalistic failure to try to leverage pressure on the White House. The White House ain’t stupid and isn’t biting.
I hope not. McCarthy doesn’t have the votes. He doesn’t even have a plan. Why would the White House interfere?
Update: This is the lunacy they are dealing with:
Dan Pfeiffer (subscription) explains why MAGA’s usual childishness is actually quite savvy in this case:
One of the Super Pacs allied with Donald Trump released a video on Friday morning that took the Internet by storm. The ad uses the potentially apocryphal story of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis eating chocolate pudding with his fingers to attack his past support for cutting Social Security and Medicare.
Most Trump World shenanigans are stupid, bordering on self-destructive. That is not the case with this ad, which ran on CNN and Fox News on Friday morning. On the day after DeSantis signed a dangerous six-week abortion ban, it seems trite to care about the manner in which he consumes packaged desserts. While impulse control is a valuable attribute in a Commander-in-Chief who can unilaterally launch nuclear warheads, no one should really care that DeSantis was unwilling to wait for a spoon. Frankly, his pudding impatience may be the most relatable thing about the otherwise painfully awkward, malfunctioning Westworld robot authoritarian.
But bear with me; there is ample precedent to suggest the pudding thing could hurt DeSantis’s yet-to-launch presidential campaign. I don’t want to overstate the case. This is a long campaign and one ad or one anecdote won’t dramatically alter the trajectory. This ad isn’t even that great. Still, the pudding anecdote and how the Trump folks are weaponizing it is a case study of how presidential politics works in our broken media ecosystem.
People Don’t Vote for Weirdos
Thanks to all the coverage his cruel stunts have received, Ron DeSantis has remarkably high name ID for someone who has not even served as Governor for five years. But I theorize most Republican voters couldn’t pick him out of a lineup. All they know about DeSantis is that he is a mini-Trump and pisses off all the right people (Liberals). In other words, support for or interest in DeSantis is a mile wide and an inch deep.
DeSantis’s decision to delay launching his campaign left a vacuum that Trump intends to fill. Trump, who has an instinctual sense for the jugular, is trying to introduce DeSantis to the voters before the Florida Governor can do it himself. And the picture Trump wants to paint is of DeSantis as an establishment-friendly, awkward weirdo. Trump has an instinct for the jugular and knows Americans don’t like to vote for weirdos.
Once again, I doubt anyone cares how DeSantis consumes his pudding, but the anecdote in the ad is part of a larger project to make him seem totally unrelateable. Presidential elections are inherently different from any other contest. Because the U.S. President is both head of state and head of government, they are omnipresent in American life. In picking a candidate, voters sign up to have that person in their lives for at least four years. Relatability and likeability play a role in some voters’ choices. This is known as the “beer question:” with which candidate would you rather have a beer? I wish that weren’t the case, but it is.
In the 2012 campaign, Mitt Romney had his own “pudding problem.” The Boston Globe reported that Romney had once gone on a long car ride with his dog Seamus strapped to the roof of his car. Needless to say, when voters learned about this anecdote, they were more than a little concerned about Romney’s judgment and empathy. Mostly, they just thought it was really, really weird. The story was fodder for comedians, the late night shows, and Internet jokes and memes. In the Obama campaign, we wanted as many voters to learn about Romney strapping the dog to the roof. At one point, we even engineered a photo op of President Obama taking his dog for a ride INSIDE the car, just so we could jokingly tell people about Romney’s dog.
Was this the most important issue? No. Was it a little juvenile? Definitely. Did it help us win? Maybe. It was one more data point in the larger argument that proved effective. People thought Mitt Romney was out-of-touch and could not understand their lives and concerns.
Hijacking the Freak Show
In 2006, Politico founder John Harris and disgraced Newsmax personality Mark Halperin wrote a book called The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008 that purported to lay out a roadmap for how someone could win the upcoming 2008 election. Drawing on interviews with Bill Clinton, Karl Rove and others, Harris and Halperin speculated on how that election would play out. One problem: the words “Barack Obama” do not appear once in the book.
Oops.
As you can imagine, much of that book aged like milk in the hot sun but there was one useful component. The authors coined the phrase “The Freak Show” to describe the new Internet-first media environment embodied by Matt Drudge, Rush Limbaugh, and an array of newly powerful bloggers. A candidate’s ability to navigate “The Freak Show” without losing control of their public narrative was a necessary component for winning a presidential campaign. “The Freak Show” has only gotten exponentially freakier in the ensuing 17 years. The Internet, cable, and Twitter feast on weird personal foibles like a leading presidential contender eating pudding with his fingers. That’s the sort of content that leads to clicks and views. That’s the stuff that goes viral. And in our disaggregated media ecosystem, virality is often the only way to get a piece of content in front of a viewer.
However, going viral for the sake of virality is a bad strategy. Finding a way to piggyback a piece of persuadable information onto viral content is Holy Grail. Trump has hammered DeSantis for weeks over his past support for cutting Social Security and Medicare. There is little evidence in the polling that his attacks are reaching voters. Yet another ad about Social Security cuts would get scant attention. An ad about pudding and Social Security? That is destined to get the kind of clicks and coverage campaigns dream about. The more viral an ad goes, the more cost-effective it is.
The Pudding Ad is reminiscent of an ad George W. Bush’s campaign ran in 2004. In that campaign, John Kerry decided to go windsurfing — which was seen by some (for reasons that made no sense) as an elite and effete activity befitting of the Boston Brahmin caricature of the Senator. The Bush campaign tried to weaponize that imagery in a now somewhat infamous ad that used the footage.
Like the Trump ad, the Bush Campaign saw something funny and weird that would generate media and Internet attention and paired it with a persuasive message backed by their research.
Of course, this campaign will not be decided by an ad or one very amusing anecdote, but the entire situation is a window into what works in our very bizarre media environment.
I think this is right as depressing as that is. But I will never in a million years understand how anyone could not see that orange monster for the flaming freak that he is. The hair alone should have launched a thousand ads like this. He was relentlessly exposed as the monumental narcissist he is. I mean: “I am a very stable genius!” He suggested that people might be able to ingest disinfectant to cure COVID. He loves Kim Jong Uhn. Kim Jong Uhn!!!! And he made up out of whole cloth that he won an election he lost by 7 million votes and incited his followers to storm the US Capitol.
And it meant nothing to half the country.
I would love to know what Pfeiffer thinks accounts for the fact that the greatest weirdo the political world has ever produced managed to convince conservatives that a man who wears more makeup and hairspray than Ru Paul is their avatar. How did that happen???
It’s just a legal license to kill
The NY Times had this on the shooting of Ralph Yarl in Kansas City:
Chief Graves said that the teenager was expected to give a formal statement to investigators when his injuries allow. She also said that there was a “potential” self-defense or “stand your ground” element that investigators were examining.
But the following day, Mayor Lucas said that Missouri’s Stand Your Ground law, which was adopted in 2016, should not apply in this case.
“If Stand Your Ground really lets somebody just shoot somebody that rings a doorbell,” he said, “that put the life of every postal worker, every campaigner, every Amazon delivery person at risk in this country.”
I’m sure the man believes he was standing his ground because he “felt threatened” when a Black teenager rang his doorbell.
Then there’s the man in New York who shot at a car that accidentally turned into the wrong driveway and killed a young woman as the car was turning around. I’m sure he believes he was “standing his ground” too.
Every person’s life is at risk in this country because of this proliferation of guns and laws that allow people to shoot others with impunity. All they have to do is say they were afraid for people like Texas Governor Greg Abbott to claim they had a right to shoot them. These laws are becoming the norm all over the country.
We used to have a “duty to retreat” if at all possible. You weren’t allowed to shott people simply because you were afraid if you could have gotten away. And you couldn’t just kill people you thought might want to steal property. Today, people are being told they have a god-given right to kill anyone they want and claim they felt threatened. That killer in Texas actually wrote that on Facebook. And some of them are doing it.
This is gun culture. It’s an atrocity.