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The Martyred Messiah

Published by digby on July 18, 2024

This is a good piece by Sidney Blumenthal in the Guardian about the effects of Trump’s assassination attempt. It’s truly sickening:

The attempted assassination of Donald Trump has transformed the theology of Trump. He has long portrayed himself as an innocent lamb falsely accused, the target of slings and arrows to bear the suffering of believers. Now the bullet and the blood of Butler, Pennsylvania, have sanctified him for the faithful and brought forth a new gospel.

Earlier this month, the Republican National Committee endorsed the party platform, a document that contained a plank pledging to create a new federal agency to defend Christian nationalism: “To protect Religious Liberty, Republicans support a new Federal Task Force on Fighting Anti-Christian Bias that will investigate all forms of illegal discrimination, harassment, and persecution against Christians in America.” The document casts Christians as though they are a sect still persecuted by the Romans, about to be dragged into the Colosseum to face ferocious beasts.

But after the shooting, there was no mention of a platform. There was no reference to the political party. Trump had not simply survived crucifixion. He was not only resurrected. He became his own second coming. He was washed in his own blood. Divine intervention proved he was destined to return. All that is required from followers are declarations of faith. The return is a restoration of the grand course of events that was unjustly detoured by a stolen election. Trump is now a martyr, resurrected and the second coming all at once. All power is invested in the messiah on day one.

“The doctor at the hospital said he never saw anything like this, he called it a miracle,” Trump explained. “I’m not supposed to be here, I’m supposed to be dead. By luck or by God, many people are saying it’s by God I’m still here.” He was reborn.

His sanctification has produced a new narrative by those who wish to be seen as his most fervent apostles. They compete to proclaim the new gospel. “GOD protected President Trump yesterday,” tweeted House speaker Mike Johnson. “God’s hand of protection” held Trump safe, the Rev Franklin Graham told Fox News. “The devil came to Pennsylvania holding a rifle,” said Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina. “Listen, if you didn’t believe in miracles before Saturday, you better be believing right now.” They are the chosen messengers of the chosen one. The fervor with which they tell the story reveals more than their faith, but also establishes their seat at the table of the apostles.

There’s more at the link.

This display has the media in a massive swoon, unfortunately. They can’t stop talking about the “split-screen” between the grand love affair between Trump and his people at the RNC and Joe Biden walking haltingly up the stairs of Air Force One all alone, a broken man. (He has COVID so it’s not surprising that he’d be halting — and alone.) Trump the martyr and spiritual leader has them in his pocket at the moment. And it’s terrifying.

Crimes Against Capitalism?

Published by Tom Sullivan on July 18, 2024

The Midas Cult strikes back

Rick Perlstein has been punishing himself reading a copy of Project 2025. He’s plowing through the internal contradictions so you don’t have to.

His second installment uncovers needles in that haystack as well as dirty needles in plain view. Among them:

  • They want to get rid of vehicle fuel efficiency standards, a major reason why cars made in the 1970s got under 20 miles to a gallon, but ones made now get over 40. The Heritage Foundation, in a detour to Alice’s Wonderland, says fuel efficiency has “negative consequences for air quality.”
  • They blame the deadly, underregulation-driven failure of the nation’s only independentpower grid, in Texas in 2021, on “pressure to use 100 percent renewables,” which somehow forces installation of power lines that can’t access electricity from any other source. The solution? Support diversity by sticking to “coal, nuclear, and natural gas.”
  • “Eliminate or Reform the Dietary Guidelines,” because those tables we used to read on the sides of cereal boxes when we were kids might become Trojan horses for “objectives unrelated to the nutritional and dietary well-being of Americans” such as “the health of the planet.”
  • “Transition the Safer Choice program”—a voluntary perk allowing companies to slap a label on cleaning products indicating they meet EPA safe product standards—”to the private sector.” On the bright side: If industry chooses the standards, many more will volunteer to participate.

“Discrimination is singled out as a bad thing, to be sure,” Perlstein finds. “Heritage would just render it impossible to fight” by not measuring it. Simply “prohibit racial classifications.” Problem solved! Becasue racial tracking of employees is a crime against “the diversity of the American workforce.”

There’s plenty of weirdness authored by “the reactionary wing of … the Holy Roman Catholic Church.” Perlstein makes this observation on how the faith insinuates itself into policy.

One of the ways Catholicism builds its influence within so many diverse societies around the globe is “syncretism”: emphasizing church teachings that resemble sacred beliefs of its host culture—like enslaved Brazilians being told that Catholic saints were a lot like the panoply of spirits in the local version of West African religion. Here, Heritage deploys a Catholic version of our sacred symbol: individualism. Not the good, liberal kind, where people choose their values from their own experience and self-reflection; that’s a heresy. 

I’ve reflected plenty on our need to sanctify profit-making, another sacred belief of American culture. It’s a principle reason the Midas Cult is determined to divert the hundreds of billions collected for Social Security or spent each year on public education to the private sector:

It’s bad enough that states are not providing education on at least a not-for-profit basis. But it’s far worse than that. They’re giving it away! That’s a mortal sin. A crime against capitalism. The worst kind of creeping socialism. Hundreds of billions of tax dollars spent every year in a nonprofit community effort to educate a nation’s children, and the moguls are not skimming off the top. The horror.

That perspective is reflected in Project 2025 as well. The Project 2025 team will move to privatize more taxpayer-funded services and (one way or another) make them fee-for-service. Among them, free weather reports:

Charging for popular services that were previously free isn’t generally a winning political strategy. But hard-right policy makers appear poised to try to do just that should Republicans gain power in the next term. Project 2025—a nearly 900-page book of policy proposals published by the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation—states that an incoming administration should all but dissolve the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, under which the National Weather Service operates. Donald Trump has attempted to distance himself from Project 2025, but given that it was largely written by veterans of his first administration, the document is widely seen as a blueprint for a second Trump term.

[…]

Privatizing the weather is not a new conservative aim. Nearly two decades ago, when the National Weather Service updated its website to be more user-friendly, Barry Myers, then executive vice president of AccuWeather, complained to the press that “we work very hard every day competing with other companies, and we also have to compete with the government.” In 2005, after meeting with a representative from AccuWeather, then-Senator Rick Santorum introduced a bill calling for the NWS to cease competition with the private sector, and reserve its forecasts for commercial providers. The bill never made it out of committee. But in 2017, Trump picked Myers to lead NOAA. (Myers withdrew his nomination after waiting two years for Senate confirmation.)

Michael Lewis in his 2018 book “The Fifth Risk” explains that government manages a portfolio of risks that requires “mission-driven” careerists, experts with a dedication to the work, not to making big money from it:

Donald Trump’s administration came to Washington to upend that system. Not to improve it, but to exploit it for profit. They abandoned data collection on anything Trumpers opposed, the New York Times review explained, “like climate change or food safety regulations, or that they didn’t care about, like poverty, or stuff that they assumed were government boondoggles, which was most everything not involving the Pentagon.”

And next the National Weather Service. Lewis followed the Barry Meyers-NWS saga in “The Fifth Risk.” Severe thunderstrorm warnings you get for free on any of your devices (at a cost of roughly $4 per person per year) could disappear if a Project 2025-driven second Trump administration has its way. Kiss those hurrcane warnings goodbye too, Floridians and Gulf-dwellers. Perhaps Heritage will spin off management of the GPS system from the Department of Defense to Barry Meyers. Because in Heritage world there’s no public good but the private good.

Something to look forward to under the dictatorship of the MAGAtariat.

As Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi says: Don’t agonize, organize.

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“We’re 1933”

Published by Tom Sullivan on July 18, 2024

While the republic burns, the press chases clicks

Watching Day 3 of RNC convention coverage last night on a couple of channels, I found most of it as horrible as Donald Trump finds Milwaukee. Republican speakers shamelessly spewed lies, distortions and smears. (Daniel Dale deconstructs just a few for CNN.) Republican conventioneers held signs reading MASS DEPORTATION NOW! (CBS reports it was, in part, a deliberate troll intended to “make heads explode.”)

The convention’s message is horrible, yes, but so is the coverage.

But what made my head spin was a promo during a commerical break on MSNBC, the kind featuring a snappy clips of recent coverage. The montage was all Biden is old, will he or won’t he drop out, etc. Nothing about the stakes in this election for women and for international order and democracy. Nothing about Donald Trump’s incoherence, the GOP’s rejection of the rule of law, Project 2025 plans for terminating our republic (with extreme prejudice), our country teetering on the edge of dictatorship.

The days of news divisions being loss leaders for TV networks were gone decades ago. The Fourth Estate is no longer interested in fulfilling its role of informing the public. What once was news (print included) now is infotainment. Drama is entertaining. Joe Biden is old and could be forced out of the race is entertaining. It draws eyeballs and clicks and sells soap (yes, I’m that old).

Jennifer Rubin has noticed. Networks have moved on from the Trump phenomenon to “Biden is old” because they’ve become bored with Trump.

“The media … has done an abominable job of prioritizing what’s important and what’s not. We are on the brink of going down the road of a dictatorship,” Rubin warns. “That is more important than anything else. I know it’s attractive. You can say people have gotten used to Trump. Why have they gotten usded to Trump? Because the press has gotten used to Trump, because the press does not cover his insanity.”

Sharks and motorboats and Hannibal Lechter, etc. The press got bored with it, says Rubin. Getting bored is not the job of a free press in a free country, she adds. The job is informing the public.

But in a country that places making a buck above all else, that’s fallen by the wayside.

Reporters focusing on the drama surrounding Biden “is not reporting what is there. This is driving a narrative because they think it’s exciting, because it is exciting, and because they are personally offended that they weren’t told that [Biden] has bad days.”

Rubin is “shouting that we should pay attention because we’re 1933. We’re not 1938. We have the chance to stop the train.”

MASS DEPORTATION NOW! suggests the train (of boxcars?) and detention camps might soon be real, not metaphorical. The spectacle will show the world that the U.S. has abandoned its democratic heritage for xenophobia, grievance, and dictatorship. Our global adversaries must already be thrilled.

This morning, George Conway is launching Anti-Psychopath PAC in an attempt to refocus attention on the threat the MAGA movement and its dangerous, lunatic figurehead represents. Trump is “a sociopath or psychopath.”

Laugh or cry as you will, but get busy beating this threat to everything you hold dear.

Update: Just spotted this from last night. “We’re absolutely killing our nominee and our chances of winning.”

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Who’s “They”?

Published by digby on July 17, 2024

Eric isn’t the only one. Virtually every speaker at the RNC is suggesting that the Democrats tired to kill Donald Trump. Even though the guy who did it was a Republican. Philip Bump writes:

There is no evidence that Crooks shot at Trump because he had been influenced by anti-Trump political rhetoric, and there is no evidence that Crooks was literally or figuratively part of a collective effort to sideline or kill the former president.

It’s important to point this out explicitly because, in the days since the attack, allies of Trump have repeatedly suggested both that Democratic rhetoric is to blame or that the shooting was done by some nebulously defined “they” — a group that is generally meant to include Trump’s political opponents.

Speaking to Fox News host Laura Ingraham from the Republican National Convention on Monday night, Rep. Cory Mills (R-Fla.) suggested that the shooting was a continuation of a pattern of hostility to the former president. “The bottom line is this: First, they tried to censor and silence President Trump. Then they tried to indict and imprison President Trump,” Mills said. “Now they tried to kill President Trump.”

Mills went on to suggest that, from his experience, “this seems intentional” — presumably meaning the security failures that allowed Crooks to open fire. On Tuesday morning, Mills made similar comments to right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk. (Mills also blamed diversity initiatives for unspecified reasons, saying, “D-E-I means D-I-E.”)

The congressman wasn’t Ingraham’s only guest to suggest that “they” tried to take out Trump.“They have done everything to strip him of his wealth and of his fame. They’ve tried to break up our family and done everything to try to get him and kill him,” Trump’s son Eric Trump said on the same program. “And they literally tried to kill him this week.” He made a similar claim on CNN on Tuesday afternoon.

Earlier on Monday, former congressman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) suggested that calls for “unity” were dubious, given the moment. “My question, not trying to be cynical, is what is it going to take for that unity to last more than just one news cycle?” he asked. “They tried to kill the leading candidate for president!”

[…]

That framing is why all of this has emerged. Trump’s campaign has been centered on portraying him as a victim from the outset. That he was targeted by a shooter folds into that presentation neatly.

There’s just that one nagging little problem: There’s no known connection between the known shooter and the broad, nebulous galaxy of opponents Trump and his allies envision. Crooks wasn’t carrying a left-wing newspaper in his pocket or listening to a liberal podcast. He wasn’t a contract employee of the CIA or a staffer for the Justice Department. He wasn’t even a Democrat.

I haven’t noticed the media generally issuing a correction on this. They just say it and that’s that. At this point, for many people, it’s probably accepted as the truth.

Polls, polls, polls

Published by digby on July 17, 2024

A bunch of polls out today showing that a huge majority of Democrats want a different presidential candidate but the race is still within the margin of error. So, as I have said before, Democrats will walk over hot coals to vote for a fetid pile of garbage over Donald Trump;. The question remains how many of those independent swing voters and 3rd party types will do the same. The race is still stuck. This is the NBC poll:

In case you’re wondering whether Harris does better well, yes and no, depending:

[T]he poll showed Trump doing slightly better among white voters when matched up with Harris instead of Biden, leading her by 16 points among these voters, compared with his 14-point advantage here against Biden.

(These subgroups of voters, however, all have substantially larger margins of error than the poll’s overall margin of error, which is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.)

Among other demographics — by age, by gender, among Latino voters — there was very little difference between Biden or Harris.

But the biggest differences between Biden and Harris in the matchup against Trump go well beyond demographics.

Among the roughly quarter of Republican voters who say they are unsatisfied with Trump as the GOP’s nominee, Trump is ahead of Biden by 46 points, 63% to 17%.

When Trump’s opponent is Harris, however, more of these dissatisfied GOP voters flock to Trump. The Republican’s lead with that group grows to 57 points, 73% to 16%.

However…

Meanwhile, among the voters who prefer a third-party candidate in the poll’s multicandidate ballot test, Trump and Biden are virtually tied with these voters in a head-to-head matchup: Trump 32%, Biden 31%, with a plurality declining to make a two-way choice, saying they were undecided, would pick another candidate, or something else.

But when Harris is the choice against Trump, more of those respondents made a pick in the two-way ballot test. The vice president leads Trump among these “other” voters, 46% to 39%, suggesting a higher upside with voters considering a third-party candidate.

Anyone who says they know the answer on this is full of it. It’s simply not obvious by the data, history offers no clues and the “vibes” are very unreliable. I guess those of us watching it from afar just have to sit back and let it unfold.

Adam Schiff asked for Biden to step aside today. Unless this is a precursor to Biden dropping out on Trump’s big night and completely wrecking his narrative, this seems like unfortunate timing to me.

Anyway, I may be having an early cocktail or two tonight. I have to watch JD Vance speak anyway.

QOTD: JD Vance

Published by digby on July 17, 2024

Vance has said many, many repellent things in his quest to be MAGA’s favorite little boy. But this one really takes the cake:

“This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, ‘well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term. And maybe it worked out for the moms and dads, though I’m skeptical. But it really didn’t work out for the kids of those marriages.”

Yeah, watching your dad beat the hell out of your mother or getting beaten yourself is a super healthy thing for kids.

Everyone says he’s super smart. I’m not convinced. He’s slick. But he has said some really stupid things even by MAGA standards. Perhaps this kind of thing might appeal to cult leaders but I honestly don’t think more that a small minority religious zealots believe anymore that women must stay in violent marriages “for the sake of the children.” This is way out on the fringe.

The Funniest Thing You’ll See Today

Published by digby on July 17, 2024

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be a proud American.”

Does he think it’s about “white pride” and “racial prejudice”? Does he know that Jane Austen was a childless, single woman and a Brit to boot? I’d guess not.

The poor kids of Florida. I honestly fear for their futures.

Why Did He Pick JD Vance?

Published by digby on July 17, 2024

Before South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem blew herself up with puppygate, I had assumed she would be Trump’s pick for VP. She has the Mar-a-Lago Barbie look and putting a woman on the ticket might have helped with those suburban moms who don’t like him very much. When she fell out of contention I figured he’s choose North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, a nice safe choice of a guy who looks like he could be on money and would be the other half of a “successful billionaire” ticket. These were choices that made some political sense in a way that even Trump would see as useful to his campaign. There were others — Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina could theoretically attract some Black voters, but more likely might reassure some white suburban types who are uncomfortable with all the racism. And Florida Senator Marco Rubio might have been a draw for the Latino vote and, again, some of those squeamish suburban voters who are a little freaked out about the anti-immigrant rhetoric and see Rubio as more of an establishment type.

In fact, Trump’s been openly begging the anti-abortion zealots to back off (temporarily) because he has “to win elections.” And the word was that after the assassination attempt on Saturday he had ordered that all the speakers tone down their speeches so that they could exploit the moment and “bring the country together” in its time of crisis. (The first two nights of the convention and several nasty Truth Social posts by the candidate quickly proved that to be a fleeting idea.) In several interviews he has shown that he understands where his campaign’s weaknesses are which would argue for him to use this most high profile decision in the campaign to try to shore them up.

So of all the choices that were discussed over the past few weeks, Senator JD Vance of Ohio was the guy who made the least sense. He’s a very aggressive MAGA extremist and his state of Ohio is already in the bag. Most importantly, he appeals to none of the constituencies Trump needs to get him over top. Trump’s not the sharpest tool in the shed on many levels but he usually has a feral instinct for branding and this ticket is the “ultra-MAGA” ticket which seems like the least likely to gain him any votes he didn’t already have. As the Washington Monthly notes, it may not be a very good bet:

Vance was a vociferous Never-Trumper until he decided to run for the Senate and assessed that jumping on the Trump train was his best bet to win it. There are seemingly hours of interviews and articles filled with insulting quotes from Vance about Trump and harsh criticism of his character, intelligence and policies. These are going to be played over and over again in the campaign and many have already gone viral. Considering Trump’s penchant for vengeance it’s hard to imagine why he is rewarding such behavior by offering Vance this plum job.

It’s not unheard of for powerful men to reward former enemies if they are properly remorseful and are willing to demonstrate their newfound fealty in the most public sycophantic fashion. Often they even prefer it if the supplicant is insincere and only doing it because they have been forced into the submissive position. It shows dominance and is a lesson to others. Trump may very well feel that way toward Vance, whose abrupt abandonment of his conspicuous Never Trump position to immediately morph into an ardent MAGA cultist has been startlingly flamboyant, even among a great crowd of former mainstream Republicans who’ve given up every shred of personal integrity to seek his favor. But does he really believe he can trust him? (Could anyone?) On the other hand, he trusted his most faithful lapdog former Vice President Mike Pence to follow his orders to usurp the Constitution and look where it got him. Maybe he sees Vance’s raw ambition as a better bet.

According to the New York Times, advisers such as Kellyanne Conway tried to convince him that someone like Rubio would be the best choice and none other than Rupert Murdoch himself apparently begged Trump not to pick Vance in favor of Burgum. The decision went back and forth for weeks. But Vance was championed by three people Trump apparently trusts above all the others. One was Tucker Carlson who lobbied hard for Vance, who’d been a regular fixture on his Fox News show, impressing Trump with “those beautiful blue eyes” which he apparently mentioned frequently. Carlson is more enamored of his embrace of authoritarianism and when he found out that Trump might be souring on Vance last month he called him from his roadshow in Australia:

[Carlson]delivered an apocalyptic warning, according to two people briefed on their conversation. He told Mr. Trump that Mr. Rubio could not be trusted — that he would work against him and would try to lead America into nuclear war. Mr. Carlson, who declined to comment for this article, told Mr. Trump that Mr. Burgum could not be trusted, either.

Mr. Carlson told Mr. Trump in that June phone call that he believed that if he chose a “neocon” as his V.P. — an abbreviation for Republicans who favor using U.S. power to implant democracy abroad — then the U.S. intelligence agencies would have every incentive to assassinate Mr. Trump in order to get their preferred president.

Trump apparently found that convincing which is terrifying in itself.

The other two top advisers who sealed the deal for Vance were Trump’s sons Don Jr. and Eric. Don Jr. had been friends with Vance since he won his senate election and both he and Eric are steeped in the online MAGA world and participants in the lucrative MAGA “conference” and speech circuit. Vance is their kind of guy. NBC reported that in the final days before Trump made the decision, Trump was leaning in the direction of Burgum, causing the boys to go ballistic:

“Don Jr. and Eric went bats— crazy: ‘Why would you do something so stupid? He offers us nothing,’” a longtime Republican operative familiar with the discussion told NBC News. “They were basically all like ‘JD, JD, JD,’” the operative said.

It’s unknown how much influence Tucker Carlson would have in a new Trump administration but it seems pretty clear that Don Jr. and Eric will be heavily involved even though they will be carrying on the family business with lucrative overseas ventures cropping up all over the place.

Don Jr. explained that he will be exercising veto power over personnel decisions that don’t carry the MAGA party line:

I have to say that in all the articles written about this decision, what comes across to me is that Donald Trump has lost a step. Maybe he’s just so cocky about winning that he doesn’t think it matters, which is possible. But from the way it sounds, he let himself be steamrolled into picking someone who on some level he knows wasn’t the best choice for his electoral prospects. Maybe the 78 year old Trump is just as weak and tired as that other old guy he’s running against.

Salon

The Great Replacement Goes To Milwaukee

Published by Tom Sullivan on July 17, 2024

Xenophobia is baked in

True to form, Republicans on Day Two of their national convention leaned hard into their xenophobia. Along with “dubious or misleading statistics” cited by Kari Lake, Sen. Ted Cruz, Rep. Mike Johnson, and Rep. Steve Scalise, Republicans repeatedly referenced (if sotto voce) the Great Replacement Theory. Specifically and falsely, they alleged that Democrats welcome non-citizens voting in elections and promote unfettered (nonwhite) immigration to turn the U.S. into a country Donald Trump would describe as a shithole.

“We cannot allow the many millions of illegal aliens they’ve allowed to cross our borders to harm our citizens, drain our resources, or disrupt our elections,” Speaker Mike Johnson (La.) told the convention. He threw in misleading statements about cities being crime-ridden. (CNN fact check):

Official data published by the FBI shows violent crime dropped significantly in the US in 2023 and in the first quarter of 2024, though there were increases in some communities; violent crime is now lower than it was in 2020, President Donald Trump’s last calendar year in office.

Kari Lake, candidate for U.S. Senate from Arizona, told the crowd that her Democratic opponent Rep. Ruben Gallego last week, “voted to let the millions of people who poured into our country illegally cast a ballot in this upcoming election.”

Um, no, says CNN’s fact check:

The House did not vote on whether to allow noncitizens to vote. The chamber passed a bill on July 10 that would require documentary proof of US citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. Gallego voted against the legislation, which is not expected to be taken up by the Democratic-controlled Senate.

CNN’s fact chek again:

When people register to vote, they must provide a driver’s license or Social Security number, and their identity is checked against existing databases. Voters are required to swear under penalty of perjury that they are a US citizen. Noncitizens who vote illegally can face imprisonment or deportation.

Gallego said in a statement that he opposed the bill because its “only purpose is to disenfranchise tens of thousands of Arizonans, and I will not vote to take away the rights of Arizonans to stop something that is already illegal.”

(Remember, when its guns, Republicans insist no new laws are required. We simply have to enforce the laws already on the books.)

Republicans will pass a meaure “to stop illegal aliens from voting in our elections,” insisted House Majority Leader Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, claiming without evidence that foreign prisons are being emptied to dump criminals here.

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate—
You’ve got to be carefully taught!
You’ve got to be carefully taught!

― from Rodgers & Hammerstein’s South Pacific

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas jumped in as well, claiming 11.5 million people have crossed the southern border under the Biden administration (a gross exaggeration). He cited lurid cases of Americans harmed by noncitizens, including a Houston woman raped and mudered “by two men who were supposed to be detained and monitored but instead released and allowed to roam free.”

(For reference: Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, adjudicated in New York for sexual assault and a 34-time convicted felon, is out on bail in New York, and in Georgia in the pending election interference case.)

“It [illegal immigration] happened because Democrats cynically decided they wanted votes from illegals more than they wanted to protect our children,” Cruz insisted.

The Washington Post’s fact check:

There is no evidence for this hyperbolic claim. Federal law bans noncitizens from voting in federal elections, including races for president, vice president, Senate or House of Representatives. Under a law adopted in 1996, noncitizens who vote can face a fine or a prison term as long as a year, or both — not to mention deportation.

But let’s not let facts get in the way of a good smear job. Any excuse to make voting harder is a good one in Republican eyes.

“I don’t want everybody to vote… As a matter of fact, our leverage in the election quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” ― Paul Weyrich (1980), co-founder of the Heritage Foundation.

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What’s So Hard About This?

Published by Tom Sullivan on July 17, 2024

They’re both old. The Republican is a lying criminal.

Joe Biden is an aging but accomplished public servant who occasionally loses his train of thought. Donald Trump is a self-obsessed, wannabe dictator, a convicted criminal three years younger, a pathological liar who falls asleep during his own trial and nominating convention. When Biden rambles, there’s a point at the end. When Trump rambles about sharks and showers and windmills, he’s incoherent.

A large swath of Americans finds it a challenge to choose between the two.

The press is more obsessed with Biden’s age and poor debate performance than with Trump’s firehose of lies and Project 2025 plans for euthanizing the republic. In Lester Holt’s NBC interview with Biden this week, Holt asked if Biden is considering dropping out of the presidential race. (Biden’s repeatedly said he won’t.) Biden answers, no. Holt won’t move on. He asks if Biden wants a chance to “get back on the horse” and “what happens if you have another episode like we saw during the debate?”

On Tuesday afternoon, Biden delivered a fiery, 30-minute speech before the NAACP convention in Las Vegas (watch it). He condemned Trump for “lying like hell” about the strong economy:

Then, capitalizing on Trump’s comment in last month’s debate in which he referenced “Black jobs,” Biden said, “Folks, I know what a Black job is: it’s the Vice President of the United States! I know what a Black job is: the first Black president in American history, Barack Obama!” as audience members roared in approval.

Biden forcefully touted his administration’s accomplishments and detailed legislative proposals for his second term, including a 5% cap on rent increases and a new assault weapon ban. He is finalizing plans for passing term limits for the Supreme Court and an enforceable ethics policy. Try finding coverage on today’s front pages.

“For more than two weeks, Biden had difficulty moving beyond the fallout from his faltering debate performance on June 27,” the Washington Post reports. Trump fomented an insurrection and picks a vice president more MAGA than himself, but Biden loses his place on the teleprompter and that merits a mention.

It’s not paranoia if they’re really out to get you. It doesn’t help that members of his congressional caucus are still trying to push him out of the race egged on by pundits. The virtual vote scheduled in late May to get around a ballot deadline in Ohio is now seen by “Pass the Torch, Joe” members as “an attempt to ram through his nomination.“

How many times do I have to say, get back to me with an alternate candidate and a plan and we’ll talk?

The irony here is that it’s progressives (the party’s DFHs) like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders who are keeping their heads and wanting to press ahead to the election fight without further ado.

Weeks after the first presidential debate (as Markos Moulitsas observed), Biden is still old and Donald Trump is still a liar.

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