Remember when Republicans thought they were finally rid of Trump and said things like this?
It didn’t last:
There has never before in history been a bigger group of craven opportunists or gutless cowards. Rubio’s not the only one, of course. The whole party has fallen into line behind the man most of them (aside from the truly dumb ones like Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin or Rep. Virginia Fox) know very well is a liar a cheat and a criminal.
This is what it’s going to take a long time to fix not the righteous application of the rule of law.
I’m pretty sure this will be reversed but in the meantime it’s nice to know that won’t have to go into my local Starbucks and see someone playing cowboy with a gun in his holster while a cop stands by at the door as I did a couple of months ago. It was an incredibly unnerving moment. I left as did a bunch of other people and the barristas were obviously nervous. This is no way to live.
A California law that bans people from carrying firearms in most public places will take effect on New Year’s Day, even as a court case continues to challenge the law.
A U.S. district judge issued a ruling Dec. 20 to block the law from taking effect, saying it violates the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and deprives people of their ability to defend themselves and their loved ones.
But on Saturday, a federal appeals court put a temporary hold on the district judge’s ruling. The appeals court decision allows the law to go into effect as the legal fight continues. Attorneys are scheduled to file arguments to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in January and in February.
The law, signed by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, prohibits people from carrying concealed guns in 26 places including public parks and playgrounds, churches, banks and zoos.
There is no reason for people other than police to carry guns in public. Nobody feels any “safer” when they see it. They feel in danger. And they often are:
Yes, a few right-wing pundits who survived Covid with their olfactories intact can smell the stink that isn’t issuing from Trump’s Depends, but they are the exceptions.
Their pro-life palaver started as a sop to one specific religious constituency, but over time it has become the symbol of the Republican Party’s whole anti-choice, anti-consent, anti-democratic ethos.
Republicans still have a lot of tricks in their bag, but their most effective line used to be that they were advocating for the will of the people versus the busybodies, black-robed masters, and buttinskis of the Democrat Party. They used to invite voters to laugh at the gag about how the most frightening words in the world were “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.”
Well, look who’s the busybodies now. (They’re not totally hypocritical, though — since they aren’t even pretending to be “here to help you.”)
There is no sign that Donald Trump believers convinced he’s been charged by God with giving them Dominion over all the Earth (and women in particular) have sobered up. They intend to show the Taliban how it’s done.
Their patron saint of empty promises (Infrastructure Week? That Obamacare replacement?) is now the front runner for the GOP nomination for president in 2024. Yes, he did deliver on Dobbs, and they are drooling about getting control of the Seven Mountains. Standing between them and their grand plans are four grand juries of ordinary Americans in three states and D.C. that reviewed evidence and issued 91 felony indictments against the King of Chaos, the Doge of Mar-a-Lago, the new Clown Prince of Crime.
The Republican front-runner vows to use the authority of the presidency to wreak “retribution” on his enemies and gut bureaucracy to make the government an instrument of his personal power. Comparisons to Nazis are overblown at this point, but Trump’s rhetoric – including his labeling of political opponents as “vermin” and warnings that immigrants will pollute the blood of America – do recall 1930s demagoguery and augur potentially America’s most extreme presidency. Abroad, Trump is signaling he’d ditch Ukraine to cozy up to autocrats like Russian President Vladimir Putin, and his hostility to alliances could even endanger NATO.
Time is running out for Republican primary candidates to topple Trump. Unless there’s an upset in the next few weeks in Iowa and New Hampshire, the former president will be more in control of the GOP than when he left Washington in disgrace in January 2021. The country has never faced an election like it – with the likely challenger, an ex-president facing 91 criminal charges across four criminal cases, including for alleged crimes against democracy, being prosecuted by a special counsel in his successor’s administration. If Trump prevails, it will be one of the most stunning, and ominous, comebacks in political history.
Meantime, writes Collinson:
A tiny Republican House majority hostage to pro-Trump extremists, which is bent on impeaching Biden and enacting massive spending cuts despite lacking a functioning mandate, will surely radicalize even further in the election year. New House Speaker Mike Johnson’s grip on power is already tenuous since he’s locked in the same governing-versus-politics dilemma that felled his predecessor Kevin McCarthy. Such is the tumult – and disgust with incumbents – that it’s quite possible that the Republican-led House and the Democratic-led Senate could flip in opposite directions this fall.
Elections are about choices. Much this election year will come down to whether an Electoral College majority of Americans are suicidal enough to return an insurrectionist to the Oval Office who’s promised to end the country his base believes was as divinely inspired as the King James version.
Mark Leibovich a few weeks back wrote that if that happens, well, that should put an end to the myth that “this is not who we are.” He wrote in The Atlantic:
In retrospect, so many of the high-minded appeals of the Obama era—“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for”; “When they go low, we go high”—feel deeply naive. Question for Michelle: What if they keep going lower and lower—and that keeps landing the lowest of the low back in the White House?
Are we really “better than this”?
One hoped that Biden was correct, that we were in fact not a nation of vandals, cranks, and insurrectionists. But then, on the very day the Capitol had been ransacked, 147 House and Senate Republicans voted not to certify Biden’s election. Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, skulked back to the ousted president a few weeks later, and the pucker-up parade to Mar-a-Lago was on. Large majorities of Republicans never stopped supporting Trump, and claim they never stopped believing that Biden stole the 2020 election and that Crooked Joe’s regime is abusing the legal system to persecute Trump out of the way.
Here we remain, amazingly enough, ready to do this all again. Trump might be the ultimate con man, but his essential nature has never been a mystery. Yet he appears to be gliding to his third straight Republican nomination and is running strong in a likely rematch with an unpopular incumbent. A durable coalition seems fully comfortable entrusting the White House to the guy who left behind a Capitol encircled with razor-wire fence and 25,000 National Guard troops protecting the federal government from his own supporters.
You can dismiss Trump voters all you want, but give them this: They’re every bit as American as any idealized vision of the place. If Trump wins in 2024, his detractors will have to reckon once again with the voters who got us here—to reconcile what it means to share a country with so many citizens who keep watching Trump spiral deeper into his moral void and still conclude, “Yes, that’s our guy.”
Perhaps Trump will choose “Honey Boo Boo” as a MAGA-pleasing running mate. Sure, she’s not old enough for federal office per the Constitution. But then, MAGA Republicans have decided that hewing to a constitution inspired by the Savior himself is optional.
Some say they were first brought in to take out the rats. Others contend they wandered in on their own.
What everyone can agree on — including those who have lived or worked at Chile’s largest prison the longest — is that the cats were here first.
For decades, they have walked along the prison’s high walls, sunbathed on the metal roof and skittered between cells crowded with 10 men each. To prison officials, they were a peculiarity of sorts, and mostly ignored. The cats kept multiplying into the hundreds.
Then prison officials realized something else: The feline residents were not only good for the rat problem. They were also good for the inmates.
“They’re our companions,” said Carlos Nuñez, a balding prisoner showing off a 2-year-old tabby he named Feita, or Ugly, from behind prison bars. While caring for multiple cats during his 14-year sentence for home burglary, he said he discovered their special essence, compared with, say, a cellmate or even a dog.
“A cat makes you worry about it, feed it, take care of it, give it special attention,” he said. “When we were outside and free, we never did this. We discovered it in here.”
Known simply as “the Pen,” the 180-year-old main penitentiary in Santiago, Chile’s capital, has long been known as a place where men live in cages and cats roam free. What is now more clearly understood is the positive effect of the prison’s roughly 300 cats on the 5,600 human residents.
The felines’ presence “has changed the inmates’ mood, has regulated their behavior and has strengthened their sense of responsibility with their duties, especially caring for animals,” said the prison’s warden, Col. Helen Leal González, who has two cats of her own at home, Reina and Dante, and a collection of cat figurines on her desk.
“Prisons are hostile places,” she added in her office, wearing a tight bun, billy club and combat boots. “So of course, when you see there’s an animal giving affection and generating these positive feelings, it logically causes a change in behavior, a change in mindset.”
Prisoners informally adopt the cats, work together to care for them, share their food and beds and, in some cases, have built them little houses. In return, the cats provide something invaluable in a lockup notorious for overcrowding and squalid conditions: love, affection and acceptance.
“Sometimes you’ll be depressed and it’s like she senses that you’re a bit down,” said Reinaldo Rodriguez, 48, who is scheduled to be imprisoned until 2031 on a firearms conviction. “She comes and glues herself to you. She’ll touch her face to yours.”
My favorite job of the week is searching for animal posts for the Friday night soother. I hesitate to admit how much time I spend “researching” them. But it makes me feel better when I do it. These stories bear out the fact that our relationship with the animals can be the thing that makes us human.
I don’t know that we can afford to be ecstatically optimistic but it is important to hear the positive case for the Democrats. It’s demoralizing to watch the news and constantly be told that Biden is toast. So here’s Simon Rosenberg’s final 2023 Hopium Chronicle. It’s New Year’s Eve. Enjoy it. The hard work starts day after tomorrow:
A Positive, Upbeat End to 2023 – Dow in record territory. Inflation running below the Fed target rate. Interest rates coming down next year. GDP growth 4.9% last quarter, looking close to 3% for this one. Best job market since the 1960s. The lowest uninsured rate in history. Crime has fallen across the US this year, rents are coming down too. Consumer sentiment is spiking. Wage growth, prime age worker participation rate and new business formation are all in historically elevated territory. Best recovery in the G7. US setting records for domestic oil and renewable production. $130b in student debt forgiven. The good news just keeps coming.
Democrats are also seeing improvement in national polling. A majority of the independent polls taken in recent weeks have Biden tied or ahead. The influential NYT poll, which had Biden trailing Trump two months ago, now has Biden up 47%-45% with likely voters. Dems have picked up 3 points in 538’s Congressional Generic tracker in recent months, and Navigator’s recent House battleground tracker polling found Republicans losing ground, and Democrats now with a clear advantage. The two most recent large sample Hispanic poll and youth polls found Biden running at or above his 2020 numbers – 57%-33% (+24) with 18-29 year olds in the Harvard/IOP poll, and 58%-31% (+27) in the bi-partisan Univision poll. The Economist/YouGov weekly tracker this week found Biden’s approval on the Israel-Hamas war 37%-32% (+5) approve w/18-29 year olds, the best of any age cohort, and 59%-23% (+36) w/Democrats – so no clear, sustained backlash there.
Here are the 16 recent polls showing Biden ahead or tied (via 538):
47-45 NYT/Siena (LVs) 49-48 Monmouth 49-48 NPR/Marist 47-46 Quinnipiac 42-41 YouGov/Economist 12/2 44-42 YouGov/Economist 11/25 39-37 YouGov 40-36 and 37-35 Leger Reuters had Biden +4 in the battleground Presidential states 45-45 Clarity 44-44 Yahoo/YouGov 41-41 Cygnal 43-43 Economist/YouGov 12/6 and 12/20 43-43 Morning Consult 12/2
It can no longer be said Trump leads in the 2024 election, and in the polling which helped create the “Trump is ahead” take, Biden now leads.
2023 has been a blue wave electoral year for Democrats, a very good year. Now the economy, consumer sentiment and polling are all ending the year on an upbeat, optimistic note. Congratulations everyone. While we have a long way to go in the 2024 election, we are ending 2023 strong, with momentum, in my view in a far better place than Republicans, who are, in just about every imaginable way, an historic shitshow – full stop.
Remember our basic take on 2024 – Joe Biden is a good President. The country is better off. The Democratic Party is strong and winning elections across the US. And they have Trump.
The Biden-Harris Campaign’s New 2024 Memo – A Must Read – The campaign just released a memo, Why Biden Will Win in 2024. It begins:
As 2023 comes to a close, the choice before the American people in November 2024 is coming into sharper focus.
With less than a month before GOP primary voters begin casting ballots in Iowa, former President Donald Trump’s extreme and dangerous agenda once again looks poised to define the Republican Party in the 2024 election.
With that reality comes a stark and sobering fact: The choice for voters next year will not simply be between competing philosophies of governing. The choice for the American people in November 2024 will be about protecting American democracy and the very individual freedoms we enjoy as Americans.
Ever since white supremacists and neo-Nazis marched on Charlottesville with the support of Donald Trump in 2017, President Biden has warned of Trump’s ability to incite political violence and wage attacks on our democracy and freedom.
President Biden wrote in The Atlantic in August 2017 that “We have an American president who has emboldened white supremacists with messages of comfort.”
When he launched his campaign for president in April 2019, Joe Biden told the nation that Donald Trump and his actions posed “a threat to this nation unlike anything I’ve ever seen in my lifetime.” That the soul of America itself was on the line.
He made the same case when he accepted his party’s nomination in August 2020, and again in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, shortly before more Americans voted for him than for any candidate in history, and again last year at Independence Hall before the 2022 midterms – which yielded the best results for a sitting president since FDR. And, when he announced his reelection bid in April, his message was the same.
Make no mistake: The stakes next year are higher than they ever have been. But voters have been clear. They will not accept the existential threat to democracy that Donald Trump represents. They will not vote for his extreme policies and “dictator on day one” approach to control their daily lives.
They’ll be clear again next November.
Reading the whole memo is our Hopium homework tonight.
I’m very worried as we should all be. But I don’t want to feel demoralized when there really is good news.
Anyway, try not to get too depressed. You’re hearing a lot of nay-saying but remember, they aren’t always right. Red tsunami anyone?
We say goodbye to the performers, filmmakers, and creatives we lost in 2023. Through their art and storytelling they soared to new heights and kept us grounded.
Watch the whole thing if you have time. Are there people like this at Biden events? I’m not saying there aren’t. But I’ve never seen them.
Democrats do have many crazies in their midst. it’s a big coalition. And I know there’s lots of woo and irrationality. Take RFK Jr. for example — there are plenty of left leaners who think he’s great. But I’d be surprised if there were many who believe that Donald Trump, for all his immense flaws, is draining blood from the brains of children and using it to drug the population. Yet Donald Trump has a not insignificant number of such people who believe this of Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton following him.
Even worse than that (if that’s possible) is the fact that the woman in the video dismisses every indisputable fact by questioning, “where did you hear that?” and insisting that it’s fake news. You can’t deal with people who believe that all reality they don’t like isn’t real.
This is cult stuff and it goes way beyond the kind of grotesque propensity for racism and bigotry that characterizes so much of our species. This is superstition and brainwashing. And there’s a lot more of it than we’ve probably seen since the early days of human civilization thanks to the internet. It’s beyond creepy.
Special counsel Jack Smith warned in a new filing Saturday that ex-President Donald Trump’s bid for immunity could “license presidents to commit crimes to remain in office.”
The brief lodged in the D.C. Court of Appeals came in response to the ex-president’s claims that he is immune to prosecution for his efforts to undo his 2020 defeat because he survived an impeachment proceeding in the Senate, and because his plotting fell within the powers and duties of his office.
If these arguments—which District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected earlier this month—won out, a president could commit crimes freely so long as he threw up sufficient hurdles to keep two-thirds of U.S. senators from voting to remove him, Smith said.
“A former president could thus bank on the practical obstacles to impeachment (a remedy designed to remove, not hold criminally accountable, a corrupt officer) to provide a safe harbor insulating him from prosecution once he has left office,” the brief reads, highlighting one potential scenario that might unfold should Trump triumph. “Under the defendant’s framework, the nation would have no recourse to deter a president from inciting his supporters during a State of the Union address to kill opposing lawmakers—thereby hamstringing any impeachment proceeding—to ensure that he remains in office unlawfully.”
That was hardly the only apocalyptic vision that Smith and his colleagues conjured. The prosecutors attacked the defense’s claims that Trump’s conspiring with state and federal officials to block President Joe Biden’s victory in the Electoral College fell within the rights and responsibilities of a president to engage with other officials on matters of federal importance.
“That approach would grant immunity from criminal prosecution to a president who accepts a bribe in exchange for directing a lucrative government contract to the payer; a president who instructs the FBI director to plant incriminating evidence on a political enemy; a president who orders the National Guard to murder his most prominent critics; or a president who sells nuclear secrets to a foreign adversary,” Smith and his team wrote. “In each of these scenarios, the president could assert that he was simply executing the laws; or communicating with the Department of Justice; or discharging his powers as commander-in-chief; or engaging in foreign diplomacy.”
It’s hard to imagine that the Supremes could possibly be so short sighted and partisan that they would agree with Trump’s argument but you never know. I suspect it’s much more likely they’ll put the case off until after the election and then call it moot if they can. The hypocrisy will be evident if they do that — they raced to decide the 2000 election. And the effect will be the same as if they decided for Trump if he wins because he will take no decision as a win and will do exactly as Smith predicts.
Surely that 6-3 majority can’t all be that myopic can they? Even as rank partisan Republican hacks they must see the danger in letting Trump off the hook? Right?
Even if a Democrat wins the White House in November 2024, we could a year from now be sitting on pins and needles wondering if Coup 2.0 is in the works. Watching the January 6, 2021 insurrection unfold may have been the most harrowing day in the lives of ordinary Americans who’ve never served in combat. One wonders if Trump country watched with beer and pretzels as if it was the Super Bowl halftime show. In any event, the Department of Justice, D.C. and Capitol Police, and nearby national guard units, will be anxious as well, and better prepared.
There’s a lot to do between now and then.
You help keep me/us sane by reading our daily rants. Thank you so very much for that and for your support. I don’t say it enough, thank God for readers:
[T]his blog’s proprietor, began writing here New Year’s Day 2003 after attracting a following at Atrios’s blog. She wrote that being invited to write by Atrios was “kind of like having Eddie Van Halen invite you up on stage to join him in a guitar solo.”
That’s how I felt when Digby invited me to join her in August 2014. (We’d met at a conference in 2009.) I began writing occasional commentaries for the Asheville Citizen-Times in mid-September 2003, got named an official (unpaid) “community columnist” in 2005, and finally started up my own blog in March 2006. (It’s still out there gathering electrons.) Eventually, a local rabble-rouser invited me to join Scrutiny Hooligans (R.I.P.) before Digby asked me to fill in over a weekend. The weekend never ended. The Citizen-Times’ then-editorial editor, a Digby fan, greeted me at an event, smiled broadly, shook my hand and said, “My friend, you have arrived.”
Behind the scenes, I’ll be plugging away trying to teach Yellow Dogs new tricks. In North Carolina. In Arizona. Maybe even in Pennsylvania. In states where voters register by party, Democrats and aligned nonprofits might, with access to the right data and the capacity to think outside the box, turn out many more of those unaffiliated voters they’ll need to win races in November.
Amateurs talk strategy. Professionals talk logistics. – attributed to Gen. Omar Bradley
Smaller, under-resourced, and less-experienced Democratic county committees may not get trained in the mechanics and logistics of turning out the vote for their candidates, especially those down-ballot candidates that constitute the farm team. State parties lack the budgets and bandwidth. So I do it.
For The Win, 5th Ed links will go out in a month or so to over 2,000 counties. (I’m essentially a spammer.) This county-level GOTV cookbook is still a lead-a-horse effort. But for county chairs open to learning new tricks, I can show them how to play like the big leagues on little league money.
Democrats tend to be policy liberals and campaign conservatives. Now is no time to go into a defensive crouch. If we mean to defend this republic from neighbors bent on turning it into an autocracy or worse — possibly much worse — we’ll need to stop listening to the Axelrods and Carvilles who stopped learning new tricks decades ago. Gen Z is bringing new energy to the table and gaining a foothold. Voters under 45 (you’ve seen the graphic) are where Democrats have the most potential for increasing voter turnout. Take risks.
Mansplaining to independents why they should vote Democrat is not the way to make that happen. Don’t ask them to do something for your party and candidate. Tell them why voting is doing something for themselves.
