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Friday Night Soother

Published by digby on July 5, 2024

Critters get hot too

A PSA for pet owners:

Practice basic summer safety

NEVER LEAVE YOUR PETS IN A PARKED CAR

Not even for a minute! Not even with the car running and air conditioner on. On a warm day, temperatures inside a vehicle can rise rapidly to dangerous levels. On an 85-degree day, for example, the temperature inside a car with the windows opened slightly can reach 102 degrees within 10 minutes. After 30 minutes, the temperature will reach 120 degrees. Your pet may suffer irreversible organ damage or die. Learn how to help a pet left inside a hot car by taking action or calling for help. Local law enforcement can follow this handy guide [PDF] on how to proceed.

Print our hot car flyer and spread the lifesaving word. Download the PDF

Watch the humidity

“High humidity amplifies the negative impact of high temperature on your pet—and in combination, these factors magnify the danger zone,” says Dr. Barbara Hodges, DVM, MBA, of the Humane Society Veterinary Medical Association. “When animals pant, moisture from their lungs evaporates and helps reduce their body heat. But high humidity conditions hamper that process and their ability to cool themselves, and their body temperature can skyrocket—rapidly—to dangerous, or even lethal, levels.”

Taking a dog’s temperature will quickly tell you if there is a serious problem. Dogs’ temperatures should not reach over 104 degrees. If your dog’s temperature does, follow the instructions below for treating heat stroke.

Pet Cooling Items on Amazon.com

Limit exercise on hot days

Take care when exercising your pet. Adjust intensity and duration of exercise in accordance with the temperature. On very hot days, limit exercise to early morning or evening hours, and be especially careful with pets with white-colored ears, who are more susceptible to skin cancer, and short-nosed pets, who typically have difficulty breathing. Asphalt gets very hot and can burn your pet’s paws, so walk your dog on the grass if possible. Always carry water with you to keep your dog from dehydrating.

Don’t rely on a fan

Pets respond differently to heat than humans do. (Dogs, for instance, sweat primarily through their feet.) And fans don’t cool off pets as effectively as they do people.

Provide ample shade and water

Any time your pet is outside, make sure they have protection from heat and sun and plenty of fresh, cold water. In heat waves, add ice to water when possible. Tree shade and tarps are ideal because they don’t obstruct air flow. A doghouse does not provide relief from heat—in fact, it makes it worse.

Cool your pet inside and out

Whip up a batch of quick and easy DIY pupsicles for dogs. And always provide water, whether your pets are inside or out with you.

Keep your pet from overheating indoors or out with a cooling body wrap, vest or mat. Soak these products in cool water, and they’ll stay cool (but usually dry) for up to three days. If your dog doesn’t find baths stressful, see if they enjoy a cooling soak.

Watch for signs of heatstroke

Extreme temperatures can cause heatstroke. Some signs of heatstroke are heavy panting, glazed eyes, a rapid heartbeat, difficulty breathing, excessive thirst, lethargy, fever, dizziness, lack of coordination, profuse salivation, vomiting, a deep red or purple tongue, seizure and unconsciousness.

Animals are at particular risk for heat stroke if they are very old, very young, overweight, not conditioned to prolonged exercise, or have heart or respiratory disease. Some breeds of dogs—like boxers, pugs, shih tzus and other dogs and cats with short muzzles—will have a much harder time breathing in extreme heat.

How to treat a pet suffering from heatstroke

Move your pet into the shade or an air-conditioned area. Apply ice packs or cold towels to their head, neck and chest or run cool (not cold) water over them. Let them drink small amounts of cool water or lick ice cubes. Take them directly to a veterinarian.

Prepare for power outages

Before a summer storm takes out the power in your home, create a disaster plan to keep your pets safe from heat stroke and other temperature-related trouble.

What About Trump’s “Glitches?”

Published by digby on July 5, 2024

Even setting aside his grotesque character, flagrant criminality and rank stupidity, Trump’s mind is also slipping precipitously. And that combination is a thousand times worse than Biden could ever do. It would be nice if the media could keep some perspective on all this. But since Trump is impervious to criticism because he’s a sociopath, they’ve decided to turn their ire on Biden instead. It’s so much more pleasant to have the right patting you on the back than issuing death threats.

Speaking of Project 2025…

Published by digby on July 5, 2024

How about the nuclear policy?

Trump’s nuclear policy is all spelled out in a new conservative manifesto by Project 2025, a coalition of over 100 far-right groups led by the Heritage Foundation, which is widely seen as the template for a possible Trump 2.0 administration. If readers of the Bulletin have heard of Project 2025, chances are that they did not go through its 900-page book “Mandate for Leadership.” They should. This policy agenda, dubbed the “Conservative Promise,” is a blueprint for the most dramatic take-over and transformation of the US democracy in history.

The Project 2025 coalition members are staffed by over 200 former officials of the first Trump administration. These sophisticated Trump-movement MAGA operatives now know how to work the levers of government and have learned from what they see as their main mistake during Trump’s first term: leaving the “deep state” intact. These conservatives proudly served Donald Trump through his administration and attempted insurrection. They are now ready to help him complete the job and their plan is here for everyone willing to see.

“Our goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained and prepared conservatives to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State,” writes Paul Dans, a former chief of staff of the Office of Personnel Management during the Trump administration and now the director of Project 2025, in his foreword to the report. Russ Vought, the chief of staff of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump and now the president of the conservative think tank Center for Renewing America, agrees: “We have to be thinking mechanically about how to take these institutions over.” Vought vows to be “ready on Day One of the next transition,” adding, “Whatever is necessary to seize control of the administrative state is really our task.”

In the nuclear realm, “seizing control” would mean implementing the most dramatic build up of nuclear weapons since the start of the Reagan administration, some four decades ago. If this hawkish political coalition gets its way in November, the scope, pace, and cost of US nuclear weapons programs would increase all at once. Their plan, which seeks to significantly increase budgets and deployments of nuclear weapons and related programs and destroy the remaining arms control agreements, would dramatically increase the risks of nuclear confrontation as a result.

Nuclear proposals. The nuclear proposals are a key part of the Project 2025 coalition’s recommendations to reshape the Defense Department. This chapter is led by Christopher Miller, a former US Army special forces colonel who served as Trump’s last defense secretary. As Michael Hirsch reports in Politico, the agenda “is far more ambitious than anything Ronald Reagan dreamed up.” (In 1980, President Reagan ordered a massive nuclear buildup, which scholars now consider to have greatly escalated the Cold War.)

In condensed and translated form, Project 2025 proposes that a second Trump administration:

  • Prioritize nuclear weapons programs over other security programs.
  • Accelerate the development and production of all nuclear weapons programs.
  • Reject any congressional efforts to find more cost-effective alternatives to current plans.
  • Increase funding for the development and production of new and modernized nuclear warheads, including the B61-12, W80-4, W87-1 Mod, and W88 Alt 370.
  • Develop a new nuclear-armed, sea-launched cruise missile, even though neither the administration nor the Navy has requested such a weapon, and the Navy has not fielded this type of weapon since they were retired by President George H.W. Bush in 1991.
  • Increase the number of nuclear weapons above current treaty limits and program goals, including buying more intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) than currently planned.
  • Expand the capabilities of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s weapons production complex, including vastly increasing budgets, shedding non-nuclear weapons programs at the national laboratories (such as those devoted to the climate crisis) and accelerating production of the plutonium pits that are the cores of nuclear weapons.
  • Prepare to test new nuclear weapons, even though the United States has signed the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty that prohibits such tests and has not tested a full-scale nuclear device since 1992.
  • Reject current arms control treaties that the coalition considers being “contrary to the goal of bolstering nuclear deterrence” and “prepare to compete in order to secure US interests should arms control efforts continue to fail.”
  • Dramatically expand the current national missile defense programs, including deploying as-yet-unproven directed energy and space-based weapons, or as the report puts it: “Abandon the existing policy of not defending the homeland against Russian and Chinese ballistic missiles.”
  • Invest in a sweeping, untested “cruise missile defense of the homeland.”
  • Accelerate all missile defense programs, national and regional.

These proposals would add unnecessary new weapons to an already expansive nuclear arsenal. If implemented, these new and expanded programs would accelerate the nuclear arms race the United States is already engaged in and encourage the expansion—or initiation—of new nuclear weapons programs in other nations around the globe.

He is, of course, all in on this. Because he knows about nuclear weapons. His uncle taught at MIT and he has the same genes. From 1986. (Trump hasn’t had a new idea in almost 40 years.)

Yeah, sure

Published by digby on July 5, 2024

Good luck dude. Your whole inner circle and entourage are involved in Project 2025. The guy whose in charge of the RNC platform, Russell Vought who was also his budget director, has been named by the Republican National Committee as the policy director for the 2024 platform committee. He wrote the chapter on the executive office of the president for Project 2025 and is said to be in charge of planning for the first 180 days of a new Trump administration.

Come on. How about this from Trump extremely close associate John McEntee:

Also:

Everyone’s saying that Trump is running from the Heritage Foundation president saying that this is a second American revolution and there will be no bloodshed if “the left allows it.” But I think it’s about this:

I wrote all about his freakout about the abortion issue this morning. He does not want to be associated with the right’s extreme position on abortion because he knows it’s deadly. The last thing he cares about is threats of violence. He makes them himself all the time.

Fair ‘N Balanced

Published by digby on July 5, 2024

It’s interesting to see the likes of David Frum recognize the imbalance in the media after all these years. People who read this blog have seen this for about three decades now. A thread:

“Donald Trump tried to overthrow an election by violence.”

That’s old news, we already reported that.

“As president, Donald Trump directed tens of millions of tax dollars to his own pockets.”

Old news.

“Russian intelligence helped elect Trump by illegal means. Trump welcomed the help.”

Russia, Russia.

“He was proven in court to have raped a woman.”

Civil proceeding, not criminal – and sexual assault, not rape. Besides … old news.

(cont’d) 

“Two dozen other women say Trump attacked them. There’s literally a recording of him boasting about it!”

Old news, we litigated all that in 2016.

“There’s new news just unsealed about Trump and Jeffrey Epstein!”

Salacious gossip, beneath our editorial standards.

(cont’d) 

“You don’t have to focus on the sex stuff. There’s more evidence that Trump gave a seat in cabinet to a man for no good reason other than to thank him for the Epstein cover-up.”

Arrant speculation. Also old news.

(cont’d) 

“It’s not arrant speculation that Trump’s family falsified receipts to cheat the government out of hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes.”

Old news.

“It’ll feel like new news because you ignored it at the time.”

We gave it a day.

“Trump used the same trick – false records – in all his many civil frauds, and also in the hush-money case that got him convicted of 34 felony counts by a jury!”

Complicated technicalities, you’re boring me.

(cont’d) 

“You want simple? Someone bravely defied a non-disclosure agreement to go on the record that Trump used the most vicious racial slurs on the set of The Apprentice.”

Doubtful source.

“The ‘suckers and losers’ quote comes from an impeccable source.”

Old news. 

“But Trump denied the ‘suckers and losers’ quote only last week during the nationally televised presidential debate. He lied to the whole country!”

Not our job to fact-check every word he says.

“But you personally know it to be a lie.”

Maybe we do, maybe we don’t.

“Okay, look, let’s do it your way. What does interest you?”

Indications of cognitive decline.

“We’ve got millions of examples of Trump obviously off his rocker.”

Right – he says crazy things all the time. Not news.

(cont’d) 

“Are you telling me that the more often a candidate for president says addled, senile, crazy things – the less newsy it is?”

Not exactly. We also need a lot of background quotes about how his party is worried. If the party is cool with his dementia, we’re cool with it. 

“These rules don’t seem on the level.”

We’re not the Supreme Court.

“The Supreme Court isn’t on the level either.”

Oh, now you’re undermining confidence in our most sacred institutions. How is that different from Trump? 

“Oh for God’s sake, the wives of two justices supported – and one conspired in – Trump’s Big Lie. I don’t understand why you sat on the story for two years.

Leave families out of it.

“Biden’s family too?”

We have to cover that, Trump’s made a campaign issue of it.

“I give up. Talk to me like I’m eight years old. How the hell do you explain what you’re doing?”

We have to report equal numbers of bad things about each side.

“But what if there aren’t equal numbers?”

That’s our job, to make sure that there are.

END 

Yep.

And now we’re going to see the next chapter which is just as predictable:

Rigging The Platform

Published by digby on July 5, 2024

The Trump campaign is keeping a tight rein on the Christian right and the Christian right doesn’t like it

One of the more obvious signs that the Republican Party had devolved into a cult of personality was in 2020 when they decided to abandon writing a party platform in advance of the election and simply said that whatever Donald Trump wanted to do was fine with them. I don’t think that’s ever happened before but in the MAGA-fied GOP that sort of thing certainly isn’t unusual. However, they’re going back to the tradition of writing an actual platform this year and it’s causing some unexpected heartburn.

Just because party members want a platform doesn’t mean Trump does. But he and his campaign have acquiesced within certain parameters. The NY Times reported that Trump’s campaign managers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles sent a memo ordering the platform committee demanding they pare down the document “to ensure our policy commitments to the American people are clear, concise and easily digestible” because “publishing an unnecessarily verbose treatise will provide more fuel for our opponent’s fire of misinformation and misrepresentation to voters.” They made it clear that while it’s probably ok for the minions to have their little ideological exercise, it’s still Dear Leader’s “principled and popular vision for America’s future.”

There is some grumbling in the ranks about this, mostly from anti-abortion activists who want to ensure that the party doesn’t deviate from its long held goal of banning abortion nationwide despite Trump’s attempts to hide those intentions with his fatuous declarations that by overturning Roe v wade, he “sent it back to the states which is what everyone on both sides always wanted.” One staunch anti-abortion activist Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, appeared on CNN earlier and made it clear that she believes the platform should remain what it has been for 40 years.

As she points out, the campaign actually blocked anti-abortion delegates from participating and it’s not sitting well with that faction of the party. Politico reports:

According to the affidavits prepared for the RNC’s committee on contests, obtained by POLITICO, the Trump campaign and RNC staffers held a separate vote to elect a different slate of platform committee delegates.

The documents allege that at least two GOP staffers who were formerly employed by the Trump campaign “[pressured] them to vote against” Ryggs and Connelly and tried to “circumvent” the official vote.

Gosh, I wonder where they ever got the idea to do something like that?

Apparently, even big guns like Ralph Reed, founder and chair of the Faith & Freedom Coalition, are very concerned that this could demobilize the Evangelical vote. He told Politico:

I would strongly urge the leadership of the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign to proceed with great caution on the platform and avoid doing anything that would discourage or in any way deflate the enthusiasm of pro-life and evangelical vote. Right now, sitting here today, they are prepared to crawl across broken glass, to do everything in their power to see President Trump re-elected. I don’t want to see anything happen that would change that current dynamic.

A similar warning came from Tim Chapman, incoming president of the social conservative group Advancing American Freedom, who told ABC News “The talk of changing the Republican party’s pro-life platform is deeply concerning for pro-life Americans across the country,”

Reed is now  leading what he calls the “Platform Integrity Project” in which he’s calling on the faithful to weigh in and demand that the platform holds to its hard-line position. The New York Times reported that a coalition of 10 conservative groups, including the Family Research Council , Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America and Concerned Women for America have urged Trump to “make clear that you do not intend to weaken the pro-life plank” while also praising him as “the most pro-life president in American history.”

And it isn’t just obfuscating the party’s radical position on abortion that has them upset. They don’t want anyone touching their other extremist policies either. As LGBTQ Nation reported, Suzanne Bowdey of the Family Research Council’s site is worried that the slimmed down platform might not include their opposition to “extremism like same-sex marriage and transgenderism which is currently part of a long section “that accuses the Supreme Court of “rob[bing] 320 million Americans of their legitimate constitutional authority to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman.” They are all in on outlawing IVF and using the Comstock Law to ban contraception and pornography as well.

Semafor reported that the campaign will attempt to keep this all under wraps by moving the writing of the platform behind closed doors, another break from tradition. Both parties have always written their platforms publicly for the delegates to see and offer input and they’ve allowed the press to have access and report on it. The meetings are usually aired on CSPAN. The Democrats plan to do that at their convention in August as they always have but the prospect of any kind of argument with the Trump campaign, or one suspects, the public airing of the campaign swatting down members of the rank and file will not be tolerated at the RNC. Keep the family squabbles behind closed doors at all costs. Their leader wants a united front.

None of this is to say that Trump has actually moderated his views. The truth is that he doesn’t really care about any of this culture war stuff but he is worried that overturning Roe v Wade is going to hurt him. He says at his rallies and in speeches, “you have to follow your heart but we need to win elections” which translates to, “don’t worry, I’m just saying this to win over voters, I’ll do whatever you want once I win the election.”

These folks shouldn’t worry too much. The men in charge of the Platform Committee are dedicated, far right extremists. One of them is Platform 2025’s top drafter, the Christian nationalist Russ Vought, who I wrote about here. Another is Trump loyalist Ed Martin, a longtime right wing operative who is best remembered in the general public for being fired by CNN for racist comments. As it happens CNN’s Kfiles turned up some footage of Martin that should come as a huge relief to the Christian right organizations. He’s so extreme that he wants to jail women who get abortions and ban the procedure with no exceptions:

These men are hard core Christian Nationalists who are involved in the planning for a second Trump term. And they are very practical about doing whatever it takes to regain power for that purpose. A little fudging on the platform, letting the Republicans pretend to the mainstream press that they aren’t radical in order to win over some of those valuable suburban moms is just the price of doing business. And frankly, political professionals like Ralph Reed and Marjorie Dannenfelser know that as well. They’re just playing the roles of anti-abortion activists for their flocks to show that they haven’t given up the fight. I’m confident they’ll all be on board the Trump train with full enthusiasm when the time comes.

It’s A Cult

Published by Tom Sullivan on July 5, 2024

A burning tradtion

I’d not seen this clip before. Not sure I want to remember it now.

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Behold The New Mad King

Published by Tom Sullivan on July 5, 2024

You thought we’d put this behind us?

Casanova Frankenstein: It’s so easy to get the best of people when they care about each other. Which is why evil will always have the edge. You good guys are always so bound by the rules (throws switch & electrocutes the Frat Boys). You see, I kill my own men. And lucky me…I get the girl. (Mystery Men, 1999.)

A reliable feature of our politics is that people from the center to the left, including the press, direct more fire at Democrats than at Republicans. It’s not that Democrats deserve more criticism. It’s that the aggrieved see more chance that their complaints will leave a mark on the left than on conservatives better armored against them. If shamelessness is conservatives’ superpower, giving a damn is the left’s kryptonite.

Protecting our freedoms matters. Improving other people’s lives matters. A more perfect union matters. Equal justice under law matters. Just not to our opponents, if ever it was.

Joe Biden’s terrible debate performance bleeds, so it leads. The media feeding frenzy is dispiriting in the extreme. Some Democrats tearing out their hair in panic and others circling the wagons around Biden makes quite a messy show. Pixels and ink, eyeballs and clicks.

And while the piranhas chomp away at the party that actually gives a damn about salvaging a country once aspirationally dedicated to the proposition that all men persons are created equal, supposed Real Americans™ who never accepted that proposition (except as a marketing slogan) march towards reformatting the United States as a monarchy similar to the one we declared ourselves free of on July 4, 1776.

The cruelest irony is that it was a mad king that drove our 18th century forebears to separate from England. Now, MAGA Republicans want not just to restore the monarchy, but with a 21st century mad king. A poor person’s idea of a rich person, a foolish person’s idea of a smart one.

I keep returning to something Matt Taibbi (in his snappier days) wrote about in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse about Americans’ inability to muster outrage at the people who really screwed them over. We kiss up and kick down. No matter how many indictments, convictions and scandals, no matter how many lies told or people cheated, no matter that the MAGA GOP means to end the American experiment by crowning a king who can do no wrong:

It’s a classic peasant mentality: going into fits of groveling and bowing whenever the master’s carriage rides by, then fuming against the Turks in Crimea or the Jews in the Pale or whoever after spending fifteen hard hours in the fields. You know you’re a peasant when you worship the very people who are right now, this minute, conning you and taking your shit. Whatever the master does, you’re on board. When you get frisky, he sticks a big cross in the middle of your village, and you spend the rest of your life praying to it with big googly eyes. Or he puts out newspapers full of innuendo about this or that faraway group and you immediately salute and rush off to join the hate squad. A good peasant is loyal, simpleminded, and full of misdirected anger. And that’s what we’ve got now, a lot of misdirected anger searching around for a non-target to mis-punish… can’t be mad at AIG, can’t be mad at Citi or Goldman Sachs. The real villains have to be the anti-AIG protesters! After all, those people earned those bonuses! If ever there was a textbook case of peasant thinking, it’s struggling middle-class Americans burned up in defense of taxpayer-funded bonuses to millionaires. It’s really weird stuff. And bound to get weirder, I imagine, as this crisis gets worse and more complicated.

That was 2009. It has gotten weirder. A large swath of a country birthed by the Enlightenment now rejects learning, science, and even honesty and common decency. In Jesus’ name, even. Democracy is too hard, too demanding. Being a subject is easier.

Behold, the MAGA mad king.

Warnings not to normalize his ravings fell on deaf ears. Those with the loudest voices in our democratic polity gave up broadcasting how depraved and insane Donald Trump is and always was. Easier to fire arrows at targets on the left who might actually feel their sting and bleed real blood.

As the super villain from Mystery Men (1999) noted, it’s always easier to get the better of people who actually care about one another.

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Won’t You Please Come To Chicago?

Published by digby on July 4, 2024

Oy vey. Just what we need, right?

Axios has been one of the most hysterical of all media outlets over Joe Biden’s debate debacle so I’m loathe to put much stock in their gossip reporting. However, this is actually informative:

If President Biden steps aside, Vice President Harris would be almost impossible to beat for the nomination, thanks to endorsements, money, optics  and 2028 politics, top officials tell us. 

All Harris needs is Biden’s backing. If she gets it, the Obamas and Clintons likely would follow, making any challenge an affront to the sitting president and two former presidents. 

If she gets Biden’s endorsement, the only way a top-tier Democrat could challenge her would be to risk their future by saying “not your turn” to the first woman vice president, first Black American vice president and first South Asian vice president.

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), who chaired the House Jan. 6 committee, told Axios’ Hans Nichols that Harris is “incredibly strong … You can’t say Biden has done a good job without saying she’s done a good job.” For her to be pushed aside from consideration, he said, “would be the kiss of death for the party.”

Of course, all this may take a while. Biden stunned — and annoyed — lots of powerful Democrats on Wednesday by digging in ahead of his interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos (now being shown as a prime-time special at 8pm ET Friday).

I think you have to give the man a little bit of time to absorb what’s happened. He’s human. He’s probably terribly embarrassed. Give him a minute.

They report that Biden and his advisers don’t think much of Harris but that sounds like more gossip to me. Maybe they don’t. But it’s irrelevant. She’s polling better than Biden and any other candidates so with this short window, it would very likely be her, as I’ve been saying since last Friday.

I agree with this analysis of the likely best next steps:

Biden’s private worries wouldn’t necessarily keep him from endorsing her publicly. It’s called politics. Biden would push to pair her with a moderate Democratic governor like Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro (51), Kentucky’s Andy Beshear (age 46), North Carolina’s Roy Cooper (67) or Illinois’ J.B. Pritzker (59).

We gamed out potential scenarios with some of the nation’s most experienced Democratic operatives. Most feel strongly that for both political and practical reasons, Harris looks all but unbeatable.

If Biden “got there” on deciding to throw in the towel, top Democrats expect he would announce he was endorsing Harris — his running mate in 2020, and partner in governing for the past three years. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said during her briefing Wednesday that one of the reasons Biden picked her back in 2020 “is because she is, indeed, the future of the party.”

One reason to go that route is to avoid the mayhem of a wide-open convention in Chicago beginning Aug. 19. That would take Democrats’ focus off Trump while they scrambled, knifed and preened.

Harris as nominee, or perhaps president, would become part of Biden’s legacy, which matters a lot to him — a proud, stubborn man who’s been in public life for 50+ years.

Then there’s the practicality: If you’re eyeing the 2028 nomination, you’re thinking about the base. Do you really want to torpedo Harris’ chance to become the first woman president of color? What are your real chances of defeating Harris and her formidable apparatus (White House, DNC, Biden-Harris campaign) when you’re less well-known nationally than she is — then beating the Trump machine, with its huge head start, in the 75 days between the Democratic convention and Election Day?

I don’t think there’s enough time to do anything else and the reality is that the Democratic base has something to say about this too.

They gamed out some of the other possibilities being mentioned:

  • Let’s say Biden didn’t endorse, or Democratic leaders insisted on a process. At the highest levels of the party, there’s talk of a series of, say, five regional debates before the convention. The candidates would debate live before the Democratic delegates, gathered in cities throughout the country (e.g., New York, Baltimore, Atlanta, Chicago, Phoenix and L.A.).
  • It’d all be televised. Then when the convention opened in Chicago on Aug. 19, delegates would have seen the field in action. There are a few problems with this, including determining who gets to debate. And you’d be trying to do something really complicated, in basically no time. “We can’t organize a two-car parade at the moment,” said one veteran of presidential campaigns who’s knee-deep in possible Plan Bs.
  • What if Biden gets out too late for that, or the debates never come together? Then you could have an old-school frenzy in Chicago of candidates racing among delegation breakfasts to make their case.
  •  Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.), a Biden campaign co-chair, said in response to a question from Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC that he’d support Harris if Biden dropped out, although he wants the ticket to continue to be Biden-Harris. “This party should not, in any way, do any thing to work around Ms. Harris,” he said. “We should do everything we can to bolster her.”
  • On CNN on Wednesday, Clyburn said you “can actually fashion the process that’s already in place to make it a mini-primary, and I would support that. … I think that Kamala Harris would acquit herself very well in that kind of a process. But then it would be fair to everybody.” A Clyburn aide later clarified that he was just explaining the existing process.

Again, I think the convention needs to be very buttoned up because outside are going to be quite a few protesters. They need to keep the circus under control.

Clyburn has heavyweight clout with Black constituents and has been pretty clear on the fact that he’s behind Harris if Biden drops — and he seems to be warming to that idea. He did say he thought there could be a “mini-primary” but I’d guess that he’s just saying that to not appear to be putting his thumb too hard on the scale for her. She’s obviously his choice.

They say that some “party elders” think replacing Biden would electrify the Democratic base and that may be right. I don’t know. But it would probably stop the bleeding. And as the tiresome Village elder Jonathan Martin tweeted out today, Trump’s inevitable racist and sexist attacks on Harris might very well turn off some of those swing voters, especially women so there is that grotesque up side.

And:

Top Democrats tell us that after a possibly contentious public fight, they’d end with a ticket featuring two faces much younger than Trump (78), probably a man and a woman, getting massive free public attention — then a surge of donations.

One would hope.

The math is simple for a new ticket to win: Both parties agree the winner will be decided by a few hundred thousand voters in seven states — Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.

Trump enjoys a small lead in most. So the new ticket would merely need to keep Biden’s vote, plus pick up a few undecided voters or current Trump-leaning “double haters” — voters who dislike both, but will hold their nose and pick one. Do this, Democrats win.

Given the amount of convention and post-convention free media — the world would be transfixed by this spectacle — the new ticket would simply need enough money to flood those seven states for 10-ish weeks. That’s a lifetime in politics.

Is this for real? Who knows? It’s risky either way. But with the Biden chum in the water the media sharks aren’t going to let up . The right’s been fairly quiet but the minute they see that Biden’s staying in they will unleash hell. I worry. A lot.