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Month: May 2023

Tucker and his “anti-corporatism”

Published by digby on May 8, 2023

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. “I was living in that world, and I was not succeeding,” he said. “It forced me to think about what I had done wrong, because I had no choice, because I had no money.” ...

His media career had given him adventures and an exciting life, he told a Caller colleague in 2015, but it had been hard to earn the kind of living he aspired to. “I’ve sweated a lot about money, a lot,” he said. “And continue to, probably more than a 45-year-old should.”

At the time, Mr. Carlson was locked in an increasingly bitter inheritance battle. His mother had died a few years earlier in France, apparently without a will, leaving her sons and her second husband, Michael Vaughan, to divide up her estate. Alongside her paintings and jewelry were the dregs of the Miller ranching fortune — a share of mineral rights sprinkled over 68,000 acres of inland Central California and valued at around $37,000.

The orderly disposal of the estate was interrupted in the fall of 2013, according to court records in California, when one of Mr. Vaughan’s daughters from a prior marriage discovered a handwritten will that left everything to him. It also included a one-sentence codicil: “I leave my sons Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson and Buckley Swanson Peck Carlson one dollar each.”

Mr. Carlson and his brother sued, alleging that the will was a forgery; a forensics specialist brought in to examine it stated that it was probably authentic. Mr. Carlson’s uncle asserted that the “discovery” of his sister’s will occurred only after a new well on the family’s California property began pumping out hundreds of barrels of oil. In court filings, the Vaughans now valued the estate’s mineral assets at $2.6 million. The litigation was still going on years later when Mr. Carlson showed up on Mr. Carolla’s podcast to hawk “Ship of Fools,” his Fox-era jeremiad about America’s selfish elites. “She didn’t raise us, she was horrible, and then she dies and causes all these problems,” Mr. Carlson told the host, describing a conversation with his brother. “And he goes, ‘It’s just perfect — she’s a bitch from the grave.’”

Yeah, he’s a real man of the people.

He’s a demagogue who will say anything. His usefulness is limited to how much money he can make which he learned is easy when you’re spouting right wing “populism” which he clearly doesn’t believe in and will abandon the moment it ceases to be profitable. But, of course, this argument isn’t really about Tucker Carlson, it’s about whether or not it’s a good idea to make common cause with fascists if they are also hostile to corporate power or want America to withdraw from involvement in foreign affairs. (They never seem to notice that they rarely want to defund the military but whatever.) It’s an interesting question. The Politico article offers this:

In a way, it’s an argument on the left that goes back to the popular front period of the 1930s, or further (in the Russian civil war, the Bolsheviks argued about making common cause with Islamic fighters from Central Asia, whose embrace of religion was distinctly non-Marxist).

Michael Kazin, the historian of American populism, says there’s a long history of fuzziness about what constitutes left and right, which complicates the question of just who you’ll deem acceptable. Prominent opposition to big business in the Great Depression, he says, also included the likes of the antisemitic radio priest Charles Coughlin and the segregationist Louisiana Gov. Huey Long.

Kazin, whose newest book is a history of the Democratic Party, says he’s sure Carlson is no fellow traveler — and also thinks coming up with a standard for how people like Hawley should be embraced or rejected might also be a little premature given the political realities: “Do you really think that Hawley’s going to support anything Biden wants? There’s a wish to have a broad anti-corporate alliance, but in the end the constituencies are very different.”

David Duhalde, chair for the Democratic Socialists of America Fund, told me that one way to slice it is a function of where you sit. A Senator like Bernie Sanders working with the libertarian Utah Republican Mike Lee to curb presidential war powers? With 100 voters in the Senate, he doesn’t have much choice. A think tanker or essayist trying to be clever? Not so much. “I’m more sympathetic to what the pols are trying to do than to media figures trying to find nuance where there isn’t any,” he says.

And for at least some people closer to the grassroots, the tendency to police against associating with ideological undesirables is a sign of a bigger sickness in elite circles. Amber A’Lee Frost, a writer and longtime fixture of the far-left Chapo Trap House podcast, once wrote about giving a talk about the importance of union organizing before an audience of tech workers. During the question and answer session afterwards, a woman approached the mic to ask what they should do if someone from the alt-right wanted to join their union.

If that happens, Frost replied, it means you’ve won.

“It was kind of a dead silence,” she told me this week, a sign that she’d said something deeply troubling.

Frost, unsurprisingly, was dismissive of both sides of the Carlson contretemps — “right wing populism is largely a cynical brand of lip service from a bunch of professional hucksters” — but says she finds the one tic in the debates about potential left-right overlap disappointingly familiar.

“They’re more invested in who’s on their side than what’s going on,” she said of the people who take umbrage at the idea that left politics might someday lure people with dubious records. “There’s this fear of contamination from the right, which betrays that these people are scared of the general population.”

I guess these people have never heard of the concept of “co-option.” But then there are suckers born every minute.

People are rightly scared of the ideas that are being pumped into the general population by these hucksters and yes, frankly, a large number of my fellow Americans terrify me because they are living in an alternate universe where science is fake and Donald Trump is a truth teller.

Be that as it may, I think the relevant point in that excerpt is this:

“Do you really think that Hawley’s going to support anything Biden wants? There’s a wish to have a broad anti-corporate alliance, but in the end the constituencies are very different.”

This is correct. Republicans are organized by one thing and one thing only: opposition to the Democrats, owning the libs. They even have a rule in the GOP led House, called the Hastert Rule, which says that they won’t bring legislation to the floor unless a majority of the Republicans support it even if they have a majority in the full House to pass it. If some people in the legislature can overcome that to pass agreeable bipartisan legislation, have at it. But people like Hawley are not temperamentally or ideologically positioned to be that sort of legislator — his constituency is a bunch of far right wingnuts. It’s always the Mitt Romneys and Susan Collins’ not the firebrands who fist bump an insurrection who cross the lines in our current politics.

More than that is the fact there are just some people you cannot ally with even if some of their agenda can line up with yours for different reasons. Hitler built the autobahn, Mussolini made the trains run on time, after all. Some things are bigger than your pet issue and empowering fascists is one of them. The poison that the phony, money grubbing, cynical bigot Tucker Carlson spreads is an urgent problem — they’re attempting coups now, largely because of it. People need to focus. This is no drill.

You’re not safe here

Published by Tom Sullivan on May 8, 2023

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.

Where do foreigners get such ideas? Study up on active shooter drills and prepare your customs declaration before entering U.S. airspace, countries advise.

More on the advisories in the Herald article. More shootings to come. More headlines, more blood, more bodies.

Jeff Sharlet over the weekend posted a series of photos he collected during and after writing “The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War.” Subtle hints that inform those travel advisories.

Mass insanities usually pass with time, but how much time?

Another GOP “abortion integrity” bill

Published by Tom Sullivan on May 8, 2023

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. Many of these clinics are working very hard to treat women, and now they’re going to have many new medically unnecessary requirements that I think many of them are going to have to close.”

The devil is in the details. Under SB20, “patients who discover at 25 weeks that their fetus is developing without lungs or a brain, for example, would be forced to carry a non-viable fetus to term – an utterly barbaric barrier,” warns the nonpartisan advocacy group Carolina Forward:

Moreover, for women who do encounter abnormalities before 25 weeks, SB 20 dictates a long series of condescending and moralistic requirements euphemistically termed “informed consent.” Section 90-21.81D of SB 20 stipulates that doctors must tell women about the “unpredictable and variable lengths of life” with the abnormalities at stake, even if this is not medical fact. The doctor must offer referrals to multiple forms of (expensive) care to encourage her to continue with the pregnancy. The doctor must make a full report to the state Department of Health and Human Services.

Carolina Forward counts off the bureaucratic hurdles Cooper referenced:

  • Requiring a consultation with a physician 72 hours before an abortion to be in person, not over the phone or remote.
  • Requiring 3 separate visits to a doctor’s office for obtaining a medication abortion. Only 1 of these actually involves giving the medication.
  • Requiring any abortion after the 12th week of pregnancy to take place in a hospital, instead of any outpatient facility. (This involves much higher costs and additional staffing and scheduling issues.)
  • Inventing brand new licensure requirements for abortion facilities, with a long list of onerous fees, and a requirement that they be annually renewed. Those requirements will likely match those for ambulatory care centers, like emergency rooms, and would effectively close every abortion clinic in North Carolina.

We’ve seen this “find the ban” shell game before in other states. It’s not in the 12 weeks. It’s elsewhere in the bill. Originally the “Safe Surrender Infants/Safe Sleep Prog. Funds” bill, SB 20 became the “Safe Surrender Infants” bill, then the “Care for Women, Children, and Families Act,” then finally just “Abortion Laws” as it grew from 11 to 47 pages.

Pearl clutching about mental health with blood all over his hands

Published by digby on May 7, 2023

I’m not entirely sure what Abbott was talking about when he claimed that California has more gun deaths (recent mass shootings? total deaths?) but perhaps he doesn’t realize that California has a much bigger population than Texas. The statistical difference in gun deaths between California and Texas is quite large. California’s death rate per capita is 9 per 100,000. Texas’ is 15.6. California has the 8th lowest rate of gun deaths in the country. Texas has the 25th.

As for he general point that both blue states and red states have gun violence, it’s absolutely true. But it’s the red states that really get the bang for the buck:

A new study published in Journal of the American Medical Association’s Surgery found that firearm deaths are more likely in small rural towns than in major urban cities, adding to research that contradicts common belief that Democratic blue areas have higher incidences of gun-related deaths than do Republican red districts.

Researchers from Children’s Hospital Philadelphia, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and the University of California examined two decades of mortality rates and cause-of-death data from the National Center for Health Statistics’ National Vital Statistics System to compile the study.

A Third Way report found that between 2000 and 2020, Trump-voting states had 12% higher murder rates than did Biden-voting cities.

Data shows that in 2020, eight of the ten states with the highest murder rates voted for the Republican presidential nominee in every election in this century.

In the past, Republicans have made crime a major campaign talking point—in October 2022, one quarter of attack ads on Democrats focused on crime, and in the two months leading up to the midterms, Fox aired about 141 crime segments on weekdays, according to the report.

A report published in the New England Journal of Medicine found guns became the leading cause of death for children starting in 2017—motor vehicle-related deaths held the number one spot for 60 years prior.

And yes Abbott does make the case for federal gun control since people can walk into any store in Texas, buy an AR-15, drive to California and mow down innocent people with it. It’s true that people get guns in all sorts of different ways but it would be really nice if the laws were uniform and they were strict enough to keep dangerous people from getting those of us who like to not live with bloody gun violence.

Speaking of which, Abbott’s very, very concerned about mental health. In 2022:

 Abbott slashed nearly $211 million from the Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC), which oversees mental health services in Texas.

Abbott diverted the funds to add to his effort to send National Guard to the Texas-Mexico border, currently known as Operation Lone Star.

No other Texas agency received a more significant cut than the HHSC when Abbott slashed funding.

The massive cut comes as Texas ranks 44th in the U.S. for an overall ranking of mental health measures and last out of all 50 states in access to mental health care, according to the 2022 State of Mental Health in America report.

He says they’ve raised the spending in the last three sessions but if they’ve raised it it’s only been this year. Here’s where Texas stands relative to the rest of the country:

And this study showed that Texas ranks last in the whole country in access to mental health care.

But sure, let’s have more mental health care. For the people who have to deal with things like this:

British pageants of different kinds

Published by digby on May 7, 2023

Despite being an American with no interest in living under a monarchy, I confess that I spent some time watching that astonishing medieval ritual of the coronation yesterday. It’s fascinating, although I resent the fact that the commentary was almost all blabbing about Harry and the balcony and almost none of it was devoted to discussing the historical context of the ceremony and explaining what it all meant, which I would have been interested to know.

However, all of that is basically an entertainment pageant and as fun as it is to watch, there’s something much more important happening in Britain as this piece by David Frum points out:

If you walked into a British supermarket this past winter, you were likely to see bare shelves in the salad aisle. Customers might have been limited to purchasing lettuce and tomatoes, if there were any lettuce or tomatoes to be found in the first place. Ask the grocers, and you’d hear technical explanations for the scarcity. High energy prices raised costs at British greenhouses; imports from warmer countries were curtailed by bad weather in Southern Europe. Behind all of these situational explanations, however, loomed a larger problem.

From the time a tomato is harvested, every minute counts en route to the purchaser’s table. In March, the BBC reported that Britain’s departure from the European Union has added 10 to 20 minutes of additional paperwork to every truckload of tomatoes shipped from Spain—longer if the truckload mixes different produce varieties. Ten to 20 minutes may not sound like much. But multiply that burden by thousands of trucks, squeeze the trucks through the bottleneck of the single underwater tunnel that connects Britain to freight traffic from Europe, and costs and delays accumulate. The result: winter tomato gluts on the continent, winter tomato shortages in the United Kingdom.

The temporary disappearance of some fresh fruits and vegetables for a few weeks in winter may be only a nuisance. Yet such nuisances are ramifying throughout the British economy, signals and symptoms of larger, system-wide trouble. British consumers are spending less on new clothes and shoes than they did in 2018 and 2019. The British are holding on to their cars longer: The average age of the vehicles on British roads has reached 8.7 years, a record. The British made about 2 million fewer trips abroad in 2022 than they did in 2018 and 2019, an almost 20 percent decline. Lingering COVID concerns offer a partial explanation. But the UK and most of its European Union neighbors had dropped most travel restrictions in January 2022 and the remainder by March.

Altogether, Britain is expected to be the worst performing of the world’s 20 biggest economies this year. The British government’s official forecaster predicts that after-inflation household incomes will decline by an average of 7.1 percent over the three years ending in spring 2024. On the present trajectory, Britain will not return to 2019 levels of disposable income until 2027. By 2024, the average British household will likely have a lower living standard than the average household in Slovenia. On present trends, the average British household will be poorer than the average in Poland by 2030.

The pandemic has not helped, but the slowdown of the British economy cannot be explained by COVID. Italy has suffered more deaths from COVID than any other major European country has, yet its economy had mostly recovered to pre-pandemic levels by the end of 2021.

Britain is now paying the price for its decision to leave the European Union. Britain voted to exit in the summer of 2016. The departure was formalized on December 31, 2020. Since then, new barriers to trade, investment, and movement have risen between Britain and its nearest neighbors. Investment in Britain has tumbled, and the British economy has shrunk. By one authoritative estimate, Britain is 4 percent poorer today than if it had stayed in the EU.

Many in the British government are reluctant to acknowledge this reality. Huw Pill, the Bank of England’s chief economist, lamented in a recent podcast interview, “What we’re facing now is that reluctance to accept that, yes, we’re all worse off.”

These costs don’t necessarily make Brexit a “mistake.” Brexit was a trade: less prosperity for more sovereignty. Countries reasonably make such trades all the time. My native Canada would dramatically increase its prosperity if it abandoned its sovereignty and merged with the United States. By their continued independence, Canadians implicitly choose otherwise, and nobody criticizes them for “Canxit.” They know the cost, and they accept the cost as worth it.

But the British were not honestly alerted to the cost of their choice. In 2016, future Prime Minister Boris Johnson campaigned for Brexit in a big red bus carrying a huge printed message: we send the eu £350 million a week. let’s fund our nhs instead.

The British were promised that Brexit meant more: more resources for public and private consumption. Instead, Brexit has predictably turned out to mean less, and the British are surprised, baffled, and angry.

The British health service is now threatened with waves of strikes by nurses and junior doctors. With the country’s finances in a post-pandemic, post-Brexit mess, the British government has squeezed the pay of health-care providers. Between 2010 and 2022, nurses have suffered a nearly 10 percent decline in their pay after adjusting for inflation; junior doctors have lost much more, according to some estimates. Many have emigrated: One in seven U.K.-trained doctors now works abroad, according to a Financial Times analysis.

Britain is compensating by importing health-care providers from Africa and Asia. Yet this contradicts another central promise of Brexit: less immigration. British immigration numbers are very tangled, partly because Brexit has induced large numbers of EU citizens living in Britain to seek British citizenship. These status changes register in the statistics even if the actual human beings have not moved at all. Still, as best as one can tell, migration into Britain has genuinely accelerated since the end of 2020, driven by asylum seekers from outside Europe and from Ukraine.

The British will vote in a national election probably sometime in 2024. You would think this coming election would be the appropriate time to assess the country’s choices and consider whether to choose a different path. You’d think wrong.

Brexit rearranged British politics in surprising ways. Brexit was backed by the Tory right and the Labour left. The Leave vote was highest in the Labour strongholds of the Midlands and northeastern England; Remain was strong in the affluent areas of London and the Tory south of England. The far left of the Labour party had always disliked the European Union as an impediment to schemes to protect and subsidize British industry from foreign competition. Jeremy Corbyn, then the Labour leader, declined to join then-Prime Minister David Cameron on the Remain side. Indeed, Corbyn has been described by one of his closest political allies as a Brexiteer “in his heart of hearts.”

Corbyn resigned in 2020. His successor as Labour leader, Keir Starmer, campaigned against Brexit in 2016. To win the next election, however, Starmer must recover northern English seats lost to the Conservatives in 2019. And so, even as polls show that a big majority of British voters now regard Brexit as a mistake, Starmer has pledged not to reverse course.

In a major speech in July 2022, Starmer dismissed criticism of Brexit as “arguments of the past.” He embraced the old Brexit slogan “Take back control” and vowed, “So let me be very clear: With Labour, Britain will not go back into the EU. We will not be joining the single market. We will not be joining a customs union.”

But if Britain can’t vote for a new approach to Europe, how does it meet the costs imposed by its present approach to Europe?

The short answer to that is more of the denial that Pill denounced.

In economic terms, Brexit means that British people must work harder and consume less. But Starmer’s 10-point manifesto for 2024 promises more consumption: more spending on health and public services. That would be a difficult-enough promise for today’s Brexit-hobbled British economy. Starmer undertakes to make the future British economy even less efficient than today’s, by joining more spending to more government management of key industries, specifically railways, energy, and public utilities.

Britain is a society of tremendous capabilities: deep political stability and rule of law, a highly educated and skilled population, a world-spanning language, the planet’s most recognized and admired cultural institutions. The whole world will watch the coronation of King Charles III as carried by the BBC, as styled by British designers, as celebrated by British musicians—and as mocked by British comedians. But developing those assets means accurately assessing Britain’s liabilities, and fearlessly developing plans to overcome them. That assessing and planning will require honest communication with Britain’s voters.

The next government of Britain will likely be a Labour government led by Keir Starmer. It fell to Starmer’s greatest Labour predecessor, Clement Attlee, to explain to the British people where they stood after the Second World War. Addressed as public-spirited adults, the British people met the challenge, shouldered the burden, and built new prosperity. They can do it again—if led in the same forthright way.

What a mess. And it ties into what I was talking about in the post below. What happens when the left and the right converge on an issue that turns out to be a bad idea? This would seem to be a good example of just how hard it is to fix that error.

Brexit was always about nationalism, anti-immigration and a perverse form of populism that never made a lot of sense to me. The fact that it was something of a political pageant sold on lies should have been a tip-off that something was wrong. But everyone was running on emotion and you can see the result. And apparently they’re stuck with it.

“Have a plan to kill everyone you see”

Published by digby on May 7, 2023

The GOP policy on gun violence

WTH????

IN THE WAKE of yet another mass shooting — this time at a mall in Allen, Texas, where a gunman killed at least eight people — a Fox News guest recommended that Americans who fear they may be a victim of the next shooting should “be polite and professional, but plan to kill everyone you meet.”

Alex Coker, a television host and former police officer, was quoting a line that General James Mattis reportedly told troops in the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan. But Coker now thinks that this kind of mindset is healthy for people in America.

“What do you say to folks who live in neighborhoods maybe like Allen, Texas, where they don’t think crime will ever hit them, and they don’t need to prepare? What would you tell them?” host Lawrence Jones asked Coker on Saturday night’s episode of Lawrence Jones Cross Country.

“Run away like your life depends on it. You need to be physically fit, and run fast,” Coker said. “So move move, move. Second thing is to barricade. Try to put something between you and that gunman. And the third is prepare to defend. Like a hornet’s nest, everyone comes together. And go ahead and tag the guy. Enough people coming together at once will take out that armed gunman. You can take him out and override them whether it’s even a plane or a Walmart.”

Gun nuts see this as a totally rad way to live. They love it. They think it’s all a game. The rest of us would prefer to be able to go to the mall or the doctor’s office or even just live in our own homes without having to wear full body armor and be prepared to kill everyone in sight at every moment of the day. That’s the prescription these sociopaths are offering. Oh, and prayers and complaints about mental health, (which they refuse to do anything about either. )

By the way, Texas is pulling another Uvalde, refusing to release information except to valorize the cop who took down the shooter and basically trying to cover up what happened which is that some nut mowed down a bunch of shoppers with an AR-15 yesterday. They want to alk about mental health — like they actually give a fuck.

Three mass shootings in Texas in one week. And yet they just keep doubling down.

Not ready for prime time

Published by digby on May 7, 2023

ABC obtained recordings of DeSantis’ debate prep in 2018. DeSantis. It’s clear he hasn’t improved in the last five years. The man is, as we’ve seen, unlikable and thin-skinned. It’s interesting though, that he’s always been very concerned about not “pissing off” Trump voters. He’s not alone, of course. Every Republican office holder is almost incontinent at the mere idea of such a thing.

Anyway, here was Ron DeSantis getting ready to debate Andrew Gillum in 2018. Note that the two Florida Republicans helping him have already endorsed Donald Trump:

During his first bid for statewide office in 2018, Ron DeSantis was grappling with a key issue that he could soon face again during his potential 2024 bid for the White House: how to not alienate Donald Trump’s base.

“Is there any issue upon which you disagree with President Trump?” DeSantis was asked by Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz in footage exclusively obtained by ABC News of the team’s mock debate sessions during DeSantis’ 2018 run for governor.

“I have to figure out how to do this,” then-Congressman DeSantis replied, while letting out a deep sigh.

“Obviously there is because, I mean, I voted contrary to him in the Congress,” DeSantis continued. “I have to frame it in a way that’s not going to piss off all his voters.”

DeSantis goes on to suggest that he would respond by saying he would “do what I think is right,” and “support [Trump’s] agenda.”

“If I have a disagreement, I talk to him in private,” he said.

ABC News obtained nearly two and a half hours of raw internal tapes of DeSantis’ 2018 debate prep sessions that have not previously been made public. His comments in the videos provide a rare glimpse into how the Florida governor, who is now poised to enter the 2024 Republican primary, had previously calculated how to effectively appeal to Donald Trump’s fiercely loyal base while also working to carve out his own lane as a candidate — a balance that DeSantis may need to hone if he is to secure the party’s nomination in 2024.

A representative for DeSantis declined to comment when contacted by ABC News.

These new videos come amid ABC News’ recent reporting that DeSantis’ team has already quietly begun debate prep for the upcoming GOP primary, including reviewing past debate performances, sources familiar with the preparations have said. DeSantis is now likely to skip announcing an exploratory committee, despite previous reports, and instead is expected to launch a full campaign next month, sources said.

In the 2018 tapes, DeSantis at times stands behind a podium sparring with his advisers — which include Gaetz and then-state representative Byron Donalds — as they role-play DeSantis’ opponent and work through issues and possible responses to a range of questions, including whether he would accept funding from the NRA.

“Has the NRA donated to me?” DeSantis asks his team at one point.

“I don’t think the NRA is quite the boogeyman the Democrats think it is,” he says later.

Gaetz and Donalds, now both Republican members of Congress from Florida, have both endorsed Trump’s third bid for the White House in 2024.

The tapes, which depict two separate debate prep sessions during DeSantis’ 2018 gubernatorial campaign against Democrat Andrew Gillum, also show DeSantis’ team privately working through what they raise as the governor’s likability issues.

During one session captured on video, an adviser suggests that DeSantis should immediately write the word “LIKABLE” in all caps on the top of his notepad when he gets to the podium on debate night.

“I do the same thing, ’cause I have the same personality, we’re both aggressive,” the adviser, who is off camera, tells DeSantis.

“You want to have that likable, dismissive tone, and not condescending,” an adviser tells DeSantis during an off-camera exchange at another point in the video, to which DeSantis responds: “Yeah, definitely.”

At another point in the session, DeSantis dismisses some of his team’s suggestions regarding how to hit at his opponent.

“Some of the ones that are digs, I don’t think they work,” DeSantis, who is off camera, can be heard saying. “I think it makes me look like an ass—-.”

Sources tell ABC News that during DeSantis’ primary debate prep in recent weeks, his team has been paying close attention to how to help manage the governor’s facial reactions.

DeSantis’ facial expressions were on display during his recent trip to Japan when he was asked a question about trailing behind Trump in polls. His animated answer to the question went viral, with one clip garnering nearly 20 million views.

“Ron always had a problem with letting attacks get to him and getting visibly shaken by them,” one former adviser, who was previously involved in debate prep with DeSantis, told ABC News. “Not sure how that would play with Trump standing across from him.”

The following is one of the memes that he cannot shake, just like the helmet picture above. Note that the tweet is from a rabid Trump supporter…

Today in Tucker

Published by digby on May 7, 2023

This exhortation for women to have as many babies as they can possibly have is a huge part of the Great Replacement Theory. And don’t ever kid yourself — by that they mean the great “dark” Replacement Theory. It’s white women who they want breeding like rabbits. (See: Viktor Orban)

This is the intersection of racism, xenophobia and misogyny. Anti-birth control and abortion as a way of forcing the white majority to have very large families so as not to be “out-bred” by the people of color. It’s really not all that complicated.

Here is an example of how that idea is being mainstreamed:

The Deseret News is under fire for promoting an op-ed that praised Tucker Carlson’s views, even after The New York Times unveiled what appears to be a racist text message he sent after the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Driving the news: The Deseret News, which is operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, posted a piece late Tuesday in which conservative opinion writer Bethany Mandel extolled Carlson’s advice to have “Mormon levels of children.”

-At about the same time, The New York Times reported Carlson wrote a text message on Jan. 7, 2021, about a group attack on an “Antifa kid,” saying that’s “not how white men fight.” The message was cited in a lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems, which Fox settled a week before firing Carlson.

-The Desert News continued to promote Mandel’s story on social media after the Times report gained broad attention.

The intrigue: Mandel wrote a political column for the Deseret News until March, when her controversial tweets about race and ethnicity resurfaced after she stammered through an attempt to define “woke” in a viral video interview.

-The newspaper’s editor, Hal Boyd, told Axios at the time that Mandel was “no longer contributing political opinion and culture pieces for the Deseret News, but from her perspective as a mother of six, she will write longer essays and reported features related to parenting and family life.”

What they’re saying: After intense pushback on social media, Boyd tweeted Wednesday: “Tucker was a negative influence on public discourse … But his comments on family relationships highlighted in [Mandel’s] piece were interesting.”

-Neither Boyd nor Mandel responded to Axios’ request for comment.

Meanwhile, supporters of Mandel argued her piece was about family, not politics, and therefore conformed with her assignment at the newspaper.

Yes, but: Carlson’s exhortation to have more children, delivered to Fox’s overwhelmingly white audience in 2021, occurred alongside a pattern of advancing a xenophobic argument known as “replacement theory.”

-Encouraging larger families is central to that conspiracy theory.

Details: “Replacement theory,” or “great replacement” holds that immigrants and other people of color are “replacing” white and natural-born American citizens and will eventually control the country.

Catch up quick: Carlson described “birth rates among native-born Americans” as “the clearest possible measure of optimism in the future.”

-He invited guests like former Iowa Rep. Steve King to his show, who complained: “We have to do something to increase our birth rate, or the vacuum … will be filled by people who don’t believe in our values.” He’s also railed against declining birth rates in relation to immigration.

-Carlson has decried “demographic change” and complained last week that his ouster from Fox amounts to censorship of the topic.

Zoom in: Mandel’s own piece said Carlson’s views of “demographic change and our falling birth rates” deserve more attention.

Between the lines: “By publishing Mandel’s column, the editors assist her in laundering Tucker Carlson’s racist Great Replacement ideology,” said Blair Hodges, a church member who hosts the faith-related podcast “Fireside” and operates the Jazz Fans Against Racism Twitter account.

-“There is nothing Carlson or Mandel offer that couldn’t be explored using more responsible sources,” Hodges told Axios.

The other side: Carlson claimed his arguments aren’t racist because he says immigrants are “replacing” declining populations of natural-born citizens of all races, not just white people.

-Carlson’s critics — like The Hill’s Briahna Joy Gray, who conducted the interview Mandel botched in March — say while he’s “fastidiously race-neutral,” the mask slips in his objections to historic immigration reforms that ended discriminatory quotas against racial and ethnic minorities.

-In a 2021 open letter to Fox News, the Anti-Defamation League’s director said Carlson’s language was “not just a dog whistle to racists – it was a bullhorn.”

The bottom line: Carlson himself blames Democrats for falling birthrates, and fertility decline has been a popular right-wing talking point for years.

-It’s unclear how Mandel’s promotion of Carlson’s views on family planning can be separated from politics, given the context of his campaign for larger families.

Axios is also featuring another big Tucker “scoop” saying that he’s going after Fox and he’s getting all kinds of offers and will likely start his own media company which Bill O’Reilly modeled for him. Wait, what? Is Bill O’Reilly still around? The whole things sounds very dicey to me. If I had to guess, by the time Tucker gets whatever legal impediments out of the way and a new media company up and running, no one will care much about him anymore. Wingnuts are notoriously fickle when it comes to their media heroes. Glenn Beck, anyone?

I’m sure he can bring in millions whatever he does. There are enough suckers to guarantee that. But the influence he had is not going to be the same outside Fox. Unless CNN hires him as their top anchor (which isn’t out of the realm of possibility) I think his star is rapidly waning. His most likely future is as a milder Alex Jones, which is bad enough.

The action is in the state houses

Published by digby on May 7, 2023

I think we’ve all had our eyes opened about the dangers of letting this extremist GOP take over state houses. They’re building a farm team for national politics and it’s scary as hell. Just take a look at Florida if you want to feel the hair on the back of your neck stand up.

Howie Klein sent this out to Blue America members this morning.

And In The Process Help Your Favorite Candidate Win $1,000 From Blue America

We’ll get into the contest in a second; I just want to make sure that you know that the Virginia legislative elections are this year, 2023, not next year like most elections.

We’re trying to flip the House of Delegates blue and expand the narrow Democratic lead in the state Senate. Blue America has identified 5 crucial progressive races for this contest, 2 for Senate seats and 3 for House seats.

So here’s how the contest works— if you contribute to a candidate through this ActBlue page or any combination of candidates, your e-mail address is entered in a random drawing and one contributor— regardless of amount you give— will win the RIAA-certified Nimrod double platinum award, which was originally given to Howie Klein, then president of Green Day’s record company, now treasurer of Blue America. It’s a beautiful, custom award and would look gorgeous on any wall, but especially on the wall of any Green Day fan you might know.

The contest will run from Sunday, May 7 until midnight on Saturday night May 13 at midnight (technically May 14). And if you really want the Green Day record but can’t afford to make a contribution, send us a postcard to

Blue America PAC
PO Box 27201
Los Angeles, CA 90027

and let us know, and you’ll be in the drawing too!

If you’d rather enter by sending a check, you can send it to that PO box too. Please consider digging a little deeper this week and helping out in Virginia, whether you live there or anywhere else in the U.S.

Just one entry per e-mail address and if you’re a supporter of any of these candidates, there’s a special built into the contest.

The candidate who brings in the most contributions (not the most dollars, the most people– one entry per email address), will get a $1,000 check from Blue America. In these legislative races, $1,000 can make all the difference in the world. And these state legislative races can too.

Both the leaders of Congress, Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries got their starts in their respective state legislatures. And many of the most effective members of Congress did as well— like Ted Lieu (CA), Jamie Raskin (MD), Ruben Gallego (AZ), Cori Bush (MO), Jerry Nadler (NY), Bonnie Watson Coleman (NJ), Barbara Lee (CA), Morgan McGarvey (KY), Adam Schiff (CA), Steve Cohen (TN), Ilhan Omar (MN), Nikema Williams (GA), Tammy Baldwin (WI), Jeff Merkley (OR), Summer Lee (PA) and Pramila Jayapal (WA).

In fact, I first met Pramila when she was in the Washington state legislature. She’s very enthusiastic about this contest. “State legislatures across our country,” she told me, “write laws that change the lives of millions across each state, and create blueprints for federal legislation. These can be incredibly positive measures that do things like raise the wage or fight climate change. But as we’ve seen recently they can also be incredibly damaging like bans on abortion access and legislation targeting trans kids. Legislative races couldn’t be a more important tool in fighting back against extremism across our country.” And just to remind you about what a great band Green Day is… and what a great album Nimrod is…

Click here to cast your vote.

Take a number

Published by Tom Sullivan on May 7, 2023

Is unsorting America even possible?

Image via New York Times, 2016.

Bill Bishop’s “The Big Sort,” considered Americans’ tendency to self-segregate into communities “with people who live, think, and vote like we do.” There are also economic consequences to that. Inequality follows.

American society has “become less random” as it has “become more unequal,” observes Princeton sociologist Dalton Conley. He offers a quirky thought experiment in The New Yorker on how, had we the will, we might tackle inequality resulting from geography and the birth lottery. His answer to the problem that “when rich people are asked to pay more in taxes, or to send their children to school with poorer kids, they tend to move,” is a lottery of another sort.

But is inequality a problem for most Americans? Or do they see inequality as “the way things are.” Meritocracy, the prosperity gospel, and royalist sentiment argue vigorously for the status quo. Whatever. Conley’s is a thought experiment:

The core issue is that our social contract is based on place: we make decisions and fund our government in a fundamentally local way. This means that, the more we live in separate clusters, the less incentive we have to help one another, and that creates a feedback loop that worsens with time. Meanwhile, our political divisions deepen. We are more geographically polarized by social attitudes and partisanship than at any time since the Civil War. This is true across regions, within states, and even among neighborhoods. Political scientists argue about why this is happening—but nobody disputes that it is taking place.

Conley suggests a taxing lottery that follows us wherever we go:

What if, instead of paying taxes where we reside, and then reaping their benefits locally, we sprinkled taxation and revenues randomly—and therefore evenly—across the United States? What if, instead of paying a third of my taxes to New York City and State, I instead paid them to Pod No. 2,264—a group to which I was randomly assigned by a lottery the year I turned eighteen? What if, instead of camping out on the sidewalk the night before the school-enrollment date in hopes of getting my kids into a well-funded public school, I received a monthly check from Pod 2,264 that was meant to pay for my children’s schooling wherever I wanted to send them? In such a system, the retreat of affluent people from the places where they live doesn’t matter. In fact, it doesn’t matter where anybody lives. Nobody can escape contributing to the public sphere, no matter how far they move.

I’m already skeptical. First, because the rich would never consent to such a system and, second, because they’d manage to divert their funds away from public schools to private ones, as they are doing today with vouchers. But do go on.

Organizing everyone into randomly assigned pods may sound insane—and it isn’t likely to happen anytime soon, or at all—but it isn’t any crazier than the way things are set up now. Today, the vast inequalities across school districts, cities, counties, and states depend upon boundaries that evoke a prior, agrarian epoch. The whole idea that we should make policy by parish stems from the Elizabethan Poor Laws, which, at the end of the sixteenth century, set up hyper-local social safety nets; in a time of small-scale agriculture and cottage industries, when economies were regional and most people died within miles of where they were born, hyper-locality made sense. But it doesn’t make sense anymore.

Agreed. What to do about it? Having studied John Rawls and still having my draft card from the Vietnam-era draft lottery somewhere though, let’s see where Conley’s going.

In the midst of the Vietnam draft lottery, the political philosopher John Rawls proposed his own idealized blueprint for a fairer society, in a book called “A Theory of Justice.” In his imagined world, we cast our votes not from our current stations in life but from what he called the “original position”—a Platonic state in which we don’t know what place in the world we might occupy. Imagine if the federal budget were hashed out not by Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell but by unborn souls who had no idea whether they would come into the world poor or rich, Black or white, male or female. Rawls argued that, in such a reality, utilitarianism—the pursuit of the greatest good for the greatest number—wouldn’t prevail. Instead, we would seek to improve the lot of the worst off, since any of us could draw a losing number. When important matters are determined by lottery, we become more empathetic.

Sure, Conley writes, “some of us would lose in a more lottery-based society. But many of us would win.” But that happens now with the birth lottery in which many people die “within miles of where they were born.”

But it’s less stressful to think about over Sunday coffee than whether you’ll die an untimely death from our national bullet lottery.