“imagine if Biden did it”
That wasn’t all. He did his weird schtick about shower heads too:
At least he doesn’t have a stiff gait because that would be a deal breaker.
"what digby sez..."
Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
The kitchen table is on fire
Lewis Rothschild : People want leadership, Mr. President, and in the absence of genuine leadership, they’ll listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone.
Donald Trump steps up to the microphone a lot. But to Americans too busy to listen, too overworked to devote their precious free time to political news, they hear only the loudest voices and feel how the world feels. To them.
They’ll be asked this fall to hire leaders. From the president on down to the local school board. What they want in their leaders are people who will fight for them. It’s not just what you say. Words are cheap. It’s what you do. And voters need to see you doing it.
Anat Shenker-Osorio had a long essay in Rolling Stone yesterday, not so much about messaging (her specialty) but about voter attitudes she sees in her focus groups:
If my colleagues and I took a shot everytime someone in these groups decried the Democrats as doing nothing on the fascism front, we’d have cirrhosis.
As one disaffected Democratic white woman from Arizona said in April, “I don’t think any of them care really. Even if Democrats won the House, the Senate, the presidency, they’ve had it before — didn’t do anything then.” The video player is currently playing an ad.
Last month, a disaffected white Democratic man in Pittsburgh pointed out that “Biden ran in part on protecting Roe v. Wade,” and noted that Democrats stalled for weeks on legislation codifying federal protections for abortion, despite the early leak of a draft Dobbs decision overturning the landmark high court decision. “Not that I have a womb,” he went on to say, “but materially for me as an individual and as a voter, it doesn’t really matter whether the Republicans are actively taking the rights away or the Democrats are allowing them to be taken away because they’re being corroded regardless.”
Joe Biden may go down in history as the most effective Democratic president since FDR. But people don’t remember what he and federal Democrats accomplished as much as what they didn’t. Failures they remember. “You’re only as good as your last picture,” as they say in Hollywood.
Like Lewis Rothschild said in The American President, people want leaders. Right now many are ready to elect a wannabe autocrat who plays one on TV. Frustrated others want nothing to do with him, but don’t see Democrats as prepared to fight for them with more than empty words.
“Democrats had a governing trifecta for two years and failed to codify Roe or pass voting rights legislation that would have combated state-based efforts to seize people’s most fundamental freedoms over our bodies and our ballots,” Shenker-Osorio says of her higher-information subjects.
Biden is rebuilding your bridge, but he’s only as good as his last win. Voters have longer memories for what they didn’t get, and what they had taken from them while Democrats seemingly stood by.
Is it any wonder there’s a lack of belief in the efficacy of voting, especially among disaffected Dems, who feel that they were told to turn out in 2020 to stop terrible things from happening, only to see those terrible things happen anyway? It’s challenging to sell voters on the same premise this year.
Things could get far worse under a second Trump presidency, but that message is not getting to most voters, Shenker-Osorio finds.
The kitchen table is on fire
There’s a 900-page plan from the Heritage Foundation for Trump 2.0 called Project 2025. It calls for gutting the civil service and replacing it with MAGA toadies, “restricting contraception, dismantling the Department of Education, eliminating labor and environmental protections,” and more. But most people haven’t heard of it. When study subjects get briefed on Project 2025, they soundly reject it.
Where we run into problems is that when voters learn for the first time of these horrors, many wonder why Democrats don’t seem to be speaking out about them or fighting back. In an online group across battleground states on June 11, one swing Latina participant summed up these sentiments, saying that “the Democrats have to step it up. Where is the counter agenda?” More darkly, Asian-American disaffected swing men the same night didn’t like MAGA’s plan but noted that at least they have one.
Democrats lack the messaging infrastructure that right-wing media owners provide gratis to Republicans. And the both-sides mainstream press offers more coverage of the Trumpist clown show because it’s more colorful and attracts eyeballs and clicks.
But that means Democrats running on kitchen-table issues, an idée fixe among old-guard Democrats like Rep. Nancy Pelosi [timestamp: 1:17:00], get little or no traction in the minds of a distracted electorate. A laundry list of accomplishments doesn’t lodge in people’s brains the way a good story with heroes and villains does. Democrats aren’t telling one. It’s not voters’ fault that they don’t know what they don’t know. It’s a challenge Democrats are struggling to meet. And the kitchen table? The kitchen table is on fire.
The widely reported fact of Biden bleeding support from key 2020 constituencies including young people and people of color merits a cold hard look at causation. Pundits pounced to attribute these drops to some sudden onset of Trump-attraction and insist Biden has to moderate. But in reality, most of those moving away from Biden are either utterly unaware of or refuse to credit MAGA’s well-laid plans to control our lives and our livelihoods. The erosion in support isn’t driven by the lure of Trump and cannot be cured by Biden adopting lite versions of his policies. It stems from lack of awareness of what Trump and the rest of the MAGA mob say and intend; thus the only way forward is to ensure voters hear the alarm bells and believe the emergency is real.
It’s both accurate and entirely fair to lay much of public ignorance and incredulity at the media’s door. But we cannot expect voters to believe that the house is indeed on fire, that the threat of fascism is neigh, if the firefighters, that is our current leaders, aren’t attempting to put out the blaze.
How many Rocky movies did Stallone make? And they’re all the same movie. So why do people keep going? Because so many Americans themselves feel like underdogs. We want to root for the little guy with heart. Facing insurmountable odds. Risking it all. We want to feel the thrill up our spines and in the tops of our heads when Bill Conti’s trumpet fanfare introduces the training sequence. We want to hear that. Wait for it. Cheer for it. Pay for it. Over and over and over.
Say what you’re for, Shenker-Osorio insists. Paint the beautiful tomorrow. But words are not enough. They need to see you fighting for what you believe and for them. They’ll be inspired by it. That says leadership more than speeches. That’s what they’ll vote for.
You’re only as good as your last picture. Paint one.
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Move over, Guy Fawkes
Post by @lobotany_View on Threads
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New York City’s 2024 Tribeca Film Festival is running through June 16th. The festival (co-founded by Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal, and Craig Hatkoff in 2001) features a variety of media platforms, including film, TV, music, audio storytelling, games, and XR. I’m doing virtual coverage; as much as I’d love to be skipping down the streets of my birth city (well…technically Queens), physical mobility issues have made travel too uncomfortable. At any rate, I’ll be sharing reviews over the next couple weeks. The good news is that you can virtually attend as well-the festival is offering select titles via the “Tribeca at Home” online portal. Check out the website for more info. Let’s dive in!
Brats (U.S.) *** – Linndrums, teen angst, and synths…oh my! If you are of a certain age, you may recall a distinctive sub-genre of of films that propagated in the early-to-mid 80s. More often than not, they were directed by John Hughes, targeted to appeal to a mid-teens to early 20s audience, and featured mix-and-match ensembles of fast-rising young Hollywood stars like Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, Molly Ringwald, John Cryer, Judd Nelson, et. al.
In 1985, 29 year-old pop culture writer David Blum did a lengthy profile in New York magazine that was initially intended to focus solely on Emilio Estevez. However, after carousing for a few days with Estevez and some of his contemporaries, he came up with a hook for his piece, christening this core group as “The Brat Pack”. The term stuck, becoming ingrained into he pop culture lexicon.
One of those young actors was Andrew McCarthy (Class, St. Elmo’s Fire, Pretty in Pink, Less Than Zero). For his engaging documentary, McCarthy set out to track down some of his fellow Brat-packers to get their take on how this reductive labeling affected their subsequent careers; was it a curse, a blessing, or a little of both?
While it’s fun to watch McCarthy and his fellow actors sharing war stories and commiserating on the ups and downs of early stardom, the most interesting segment is toward the end of the film, when he sits down with a wary and defensive David Blum. To his credit, McCarthy keeps it civil; that said, he does share his feelings with the writer vis a vis how hurtful the “Brat Pack” labeling was to him personally, asking him if he thought it was “mean”. Blum’s pragmatic response reminded me of the sage advice given to the budding journalist in Almost Famous: “Never make friends with the band.”
Boys Go To Jupiter (U.S.) **½ – Well, you know what they say: “Boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider, girls go to college to get more knowledge.” Truth be told, I was completely oblivious about the existence of that (alleged) children’s rhyme until I consulted Mr. Google a few moments ago (I never went to college, you see). 3-D animator Julian Glander’s musical comedy fantasy (set in Florida between Christmas and New Year’s) centers on a teenage odd-jobber named Billy 5000 (voiced by Jack Corbett) who is laser-focused on making $5,000.
His pals think he works too much; chiding him for not chilling with them at the beach. When Billy stumbles across an alien creature that resembles a purple donut, he is forced to reassess his raison d’être. Toss in a subplot about an evil orange juice company out to take over the world (or something), and there you have it. Fitfully amusing, in the vein of Clerks and Slacker (the light social satire and absurdist anarchy reminded me of The Firesign Theatre at times). I enjoyed the music soundtrack, which has a pleasant dream pop vibe. For a niche audience.
Hacking Hate (Denmark/Sweden/Norway) ***½ – Move over, Lisbeth Salandar…there’s a new hacker in town, and she’s stirring up a hornet’s nest of wingnuts. Simon Klose’s timely documentary follows award-winning Swedish journalist My Vingren as she meticulously constructs a fake online profile, posing as a male white supremacist. Her goal is to smoke out a possible key influencer and glean how he and others fit into right-wing extremist recruiting.
Vingren is like a one-woman Interpol; her investigation soon points her to U.S.-based extremist networks as well, leading her to consult with whistle-blower Anika Collier Navaroli (the former Twitter employee who was instrumental in getting Trump booted off the platform) and Imrab Ahmed (another one of Elon Musk’s least-favorite people, he was sued by the X CEO for exposing the rampant hate speech on the platform).
This isn’t a video game; considering the inherently belligerent nature of the extremist culture she is exposing, Vingren is taking considerable personal risk in this type of investigative journalism (she’s much braver than I am). Especially chilling is the shadowy figure at the center of her investigation, who is like a character taken straight out of a Frederick Forsyth novel. In light of the high stakes of our own upcoming presidential election and the ancillary right-wing extremist threats, this could be the most important documentary of 2024.
Don’t You Let Me Go (Uruguay) ***½ – The protracted opening scene of Ana Guevara and Leticia Jorge’s drama (set at a wake) is so drenched in sorrow and raw emotion that it becomes something akin to grief porn. But just as I was beginning to wonder if this was going to be some kind of endurance test, one insular young woman breaks away from the proceedings to catch some air. Her name is Adela, and the recently departed was Elena, her closest friend since childhood. Adela is heading for her car when she espies a bus that seems to have appeared from nowhere. Intrigued, she boards it.
From this point onward, the narrative shifts from temporal to metaphysical concerns-as this is no ordinary bus (thank you driver for getting me here). Abracadabra …Adela has been transported to a weekend summer idyll with Elena and a mutual friend at a beach cottage. Whether this is a sense memory or a wishful conjuring on Adela’s part is not clear (shades of Tarkovsky’s Solaris). What begins as a sobering meditation on grief and loss becomes an uplifting fable about friendship, love, and savoring every morsel of joy that comes your way.
Restless (U.K.) *** – Writer-director Jed Hart’s audacious and blackly comic debut feature is driven by a terrific performance by Lyndsey Marshal, who plays a mild-mannered elder care nurse who likes nothing better than spending her off-hours baking, listening to light classical music, and settling in with her cat for some reading and quiet time. Imagine her chagrin when it becomes abundantly clear that her new next-door neighbor likes nothing better than hosting all-night ravers…every night of the week. Her first few polite requests (usually made around 4am) for the young man and his friends to keep it down are initially met with bemusement, but the situation takes a more sinister turn once she threatens to call the police. The woman’s steady descent into madness and desperation turns a “neighbor from hell” story into a modern Edgar Allan Poe tale. A satisfying revenge fantasy for anyone who’s “been there”, and a solid reinforcement for the old adage, “Watch out for the quiet ones.”
S/He is Still Her/e: The Official Genesis P-Orridge Documentary (U.S.) *** – The title of David Charles Rodrigues’ documentary is a mouthful, which is somehow appropriate because the subject of his film was a real handful. My previous awareness of P-Orridge was only through their involvement with the bands Throbbing Gristle and Psychic T.V., but this unblinking portrait reveals that there was a hell of a lot more going on in that noggin (performance artist, poet, occultist). A fascinating and eye-opening look at someone who not only lived for their art, but over the course of a lifetime, literally molded themselves into a piece of living art.
More reviews at Den of Cinema
— Dennis Hartley
I have mentioned this before but I want to put it out there again in case some of you missed it. This issue in The New Republic on what an American fascism would look like is a must read. It’s worth the subscription.
Here’s an excerpt of editor Michael Tomasky’s intro which begins by noting that there is a lot of reluctance in our political discourse to draw this comparison as if it’s hysterical to acknowledge the threat:
We have trouble seeing the hysteria. We chose the cover image, based on a well-known 1932 Hitler campaign poster, for a precise reason: that anyone transported back to 1932 Germany could very, very easily have explained away Herr Hitler’s excesses and been persuaded that his critics were going overboard. After all, he spent 1932 campaigning, negotiating, doing interviews—being a mostly normal politician. But he and his people vowed all along that they would use the tools of democracy to destroy it, and it was only after he was given power that Germany saw his movement’s full face.
Today, we at The New Republic think we can spend this election year in one of two ways. We can spend it debating whether Trump meets the nine or 17 points that define fascism. Or we can spend it saying, “He’s damn close enough, and we’d better fight.”
We unreservedly choose the latter course. And so we have assembled herein some of our leading intellectual historians of fascism; a member of the fourth estate who learned firsthand what the Trump lash feels like; a leading expert on civil-military relations; a great Guatemalan American novelist with a deep understanding of immigrants’ lives; one of our most incisive cultural critics; and a man with all-too-real experience in living under a notorious authoritarian regime. The scenarios they describe are certainly grim. We dare you to say, after reading these pieces, that they are impossible.
There is also:
The Permanent Counterrevolution: On politics and government in a fascist America by Ruth Ben-Ghiat
The End of Civic Compassion: On education in a fascist America by Jason Stanley
Each one is extremely well-written and illuminating. And, needless to say, chilling.
We can’t look away.
US House races. When asked about their House district race, likely voters choose the Democratic over the Republican candidate by a wide margin (62% to 36%).
In the 10 competitive districts (as defined by the Cook Political Report), support is higher for the Democratic candidate than for the Republican (59% to 39%).
Nine in ten or more Democratic and Republican likely voters would choose their party’s candidate, while independents are more divided. Across demographic groups and in the coastal regions, majorities favor the Democratic candidate over the Republican.
Preferences in the US House race were similar in April (60% Democrat, 38% Republican). Thirty percent of likely voters are “extremely” or “very” enthusiastic about voting for Congress this year. Fewer than four in ten across parties, regions, and demographic groups hold this view. In the competitive House races, 37 percent are “extremely” or “very” enthusiastic about voting for Congress this year.
Congressman Ted Lieu tweeted this out saying that Democrats are going to flip the House . If this holds up they may very well. Democrats are going to come out to vote against Donald Trump and here in California there are a whole lot more of them.
The Dems are playing
The Democratic National Committee is launching billboards in 10 locations across Milwaukee on Friday featuring former President Trump’s reported diss of the city that’s the site of the Republican National Convention next month.
Why it matters: Trump reportedly used “horrible” to describe the city in the key swing state during his closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill on Thursday with House Republicans, though his campaign and Republican lawmakers dispute this account…
But the Biden campaign and Democrats seized on the comments.
- Biden posted a photo on the social media platform X and wrote, “I happen to love Milwaukee.”
- Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers wrote on X, “add it to the list of things Donald Trump is wrong about.”
- Biden won Wisconsin by fewer than 21,000 votes in 2020 and his re-elect campaign is investing heavily in the the key battleground.
The billboards will run in 10 different locations across Milwaukee, the most populous county in the state and a Democratic stronghold, Axios has learned.
[…]
Donald Trump has made his contempt for Wisconsinites and their home clear,” DNC Deputy communications director Abhi Rahman said in a statement.
“The dislike is mutual – in 2020, Wisconsin handed Trump a one way ticket back to exile in Mar-a-Lago and sent President Biden to the Oval Office,” Rahman said.
“Trump hates Milwaukee because Milwaukeeans know exactly who he is – a sore loser who they’re going to make a two-time loser this November,” Rahman said.
The desperate scramble by Republicans to rationalize what he said tells the whole story. They know that Wisconsin is key. And they are freaking out about Trump insulting the state like this, especially since theb local news was all over it across the state:
“He was talking about how terrible crime and voter fraud are,” said campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung.
In another statement, the campaign wrote that it was a “total lie” that Trump called Milwaukee a “horrible city.” However, they went on to add, “President Trump was explicitly referring to the problems in Milwaukee, specifically violent crime and voter fraud,” suggesting he did make comments about the city, just not in the way some were interpreting it.
The campaign then includes a series of tweets from Republican members from Wisconsin inside the room who agree with the campaign’s description that Trump was not making a blanket disparaging statement about the city.
Republicans — including those from Wisconsin — quickly jumped to Trump’s defense, insisting the former president was talking about crime and election security.
“@realdonaldtrump was specifically referring to the CRIME RATE in Milwaukee,” Rep. Derrick Van Orden posted on X after the meeting.
Rep. Glenn Grothman told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that Trump “was concerned about the election” and “felt we need to do better in urban centers around the country.”
Rep. Bryan Steil claimed on X that Trump “did not say this” in the conference meeting.
“There is no better place than Wisconsin in July,” Steil said.
He said it and he meant it. Just like he means the insults he makes toward any place or any person that doesn’t worship him. He hates most of America.
Remember when the Republic ans spent an entire year wailing that refrain over Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky?
By the way, just the other day…
I saw this and assumed it must be a joke. It isn’t:
On Friday morning, Pope Francis was in fact full of praise for 105 entertainers from 15 countries who were invited to meet with him at a gathering that the Vatican described as an effort to “establish a link” between the humorists and the Roman Catholic Church.
“In the midst of so much gloomy news,” Francis told them, “you denounce abuses of power, you give voice to forgotten situations, you highlight abuses, you point out inappropriate behavior.” He also lauded them for getting people to “think critically by making them laugh and smile.”
Francis is a bit of a wisecracker himself. One of his standard punchlines, when people say they are praying for him, is to reply: “For or against?” — a line he riffed on during Friday’s gathering. He has also quipped that the best remedy for an ailing knee is tequila, and the comedian Ellen DeGeneres once made up a whole set built on one of Francis’ mother-in-law jokes.
Oh, please, oh please
Should Donald Trump actually show up for the scheduled June 27 presidential debate, he may find the rules irritatingly confining. There will be no opening statements. Both Trump and Joe Biden wil have two minutes to answer questions before moderators cut their mics. Red lights will flash when they have five seconds left.
Trump will have little time to ramble on about windmills, electric boats and baby sharks doo doo doo doo doo doo. Commercial breaks will give both men a breather, the New York Times reports, but they will be prohibited from huddling with advisers.
Not that Trump would, although he proved (when under threat of a contempt charge in a New York court) that his attorneys could contain him, barely. But Judge Juan Merchan will not be moderating for CNN:
The two men are readying themselves for the debate in ways almost as different as their approaches to the presidency itself. The Biden operation is blocking off much of the final week before the debate, after he returns from Europe and a California fund-raising swing, for structured preparations. Mr. Trump has long preferred looser conversations, batting around themes, ideas and one-liners more informally among advisers. He held one session at the Republican National Committee headquarters this past week.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden plainly do not like each other. The former president calls the current president the worst in American history. The current president calls his predecessor a wannabe dictator who threatens democracy itself. Four years ago, in their first encounter, Mr. Trump trampled over his rival’s talking time — the former president has since admitted privately that he was too aggressive — with Mr. Biden scolding him, “Will you shut up, man?”
The rules circulated by CNN warn that this time, “moderators will use all tools at their disposal to enforce timing and ensure a civilized discussion.”
It remains to be seen whether Jake Tapper and Dana Bash will.
One former adviser to Trump said the new restrictions may put the former president at a disadvantage.
With the Times report noting, “For his part, Mr. Trump has never consented to anything resembling traditional, rigorous debate preparation, and this election appears no exception. He has often said that he is at his best when improvising,” former 2020 Trump campaign adviser Marc Lotter admitted, “He views his rallies as debate prep. If they’re literally going to cut your mic, you’ve got to hit your marks.”
Practice is for losers
As the self-declared smartest person in any room, Trump hates being “handled.” Plus, he’s lazy and resists “traditional, rigorous debate preparation.” Which reminds me of a Scrutiny Hooligans post from 2010 regarding the 1978 “Great Pool Shootout” hosted by ABC’s Wide World of Sports. The contest was a
live tournament between fifteen-time world straight pool champion, Willie Mosconi, and well-known pool hustler, Minnesota Fats. A relentless self-promoter, Limbaugh-like with a touch of W.C. Fields, Fats was asked beforehand if he practiced much. The hustler replied with characteristic bombast, “Practice is for suckers.” Mosconi won the contest in three straight sets.
You’ll notice the resemblance, and I don’t mean somatotype.
I waited eight years for George W. Bush to lose his cool and melt down on camera. Never happened. But a boy can dream.
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