Polls mean nothing right now, as you know. But these are no more meaningless than any of the others.
The sad reality is that this race is inexplicably close and Democrats are going to have to work their asses off. Too many people have forgotten what a nightmare Trump was and unfortunately tens of millions of people loved him then and love him now. (That’s what should keep us up at night…)
Still, considering the relentless doom and gloom about Biden over the past few months, I think we should take heart in the fact that despite the sour mood in the country at least half the people haven’t lost their minds.
I’m sure you’ll recall that the NRA recently had a little “controversy” when it turned out that their revered leader Wayne LaPierre was livin’ the life of a Clarence Thomas on the members’ dues. Well, things have gotten even worse:
While the events contributing to the NRA’s freefall have been well-documented, a review of the gun rights group’s tax filings and political spending over the last 15 years provides some of the clearest evidence of its downfall—showing just how badly the legal setbacks and mismanagement have ravaged the once-formidable gun lobbying giant.
The NRA’s most recent tax return, filed in November of this year for 2022, reveals dramatic declines along almost every conceivable metric: revenue, assets, member dues, lobbying, and political spending—with conversely sharp increases in legal costs and deficits.
And as the NRA’s power and influence has waned, gun violence has perversely soared, particularly suicides, especially in the wake of the pandemic.
In one view, the NRA’s decline might be seen as a consequence of its own “success,” as its gargantuan lobbying efforts in the early to mid-2010s effectively froze the national gun control debate, diminishing the advocacy group’s utility. Still, that might be changing.
In 2022, 15 GOP senators repudiated the NRA, passing the first meaningful gun control package in decades. That could be a signal of the NRA’s demise, but it also could be interpreted as a reaction to the surging gun violence that continues to this day in part because of the lax gun laws that the NRA advocated for and won over that time.
What is clear is that the NRA today is in a dismal state. On the income side, 2022 was the fourth year in a row that revenue fell, marking its weakest fundraising year since at least 2008. Membership dues are at all-time lows, according to available public data, and staffing is at the lowest point since those costs began their downward plunge in 2016, while the group’s legal costs—largely driven by civil actions alleging rampant mismanagement of funds and self-dealing—are proportionately higher than ever.
I think the gun proliferation zealotry is now so thoroughly inculcated on the right that they are no longer needed. It’s possible that there will be some tweaking around the edges but when the Supremes finally validated the individual right to bear arms in 2008, the deal was pretty well sealed short of a constitutional amendment. Who needs the NRA when you have the high court?
It’s going to take a major sea change to change this status quo. I wish I could see an end to it. Still, it’s a nice Christmas present to see this article. The world is a better place without the NRA running the Republican Party.
Update — On the other hand, who needs the Republican Party if you have nihilistic fanatics on the court?
A federal judge on Wednesday blocked a California law that would have banned carrying firearms in most public places, ruling that it violates the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and deprives people of their ability to defend themselves and their loved ones.
The law signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in September was set to take effect Jan. 1. It would have prohibited people from carrying concealed guns in 26 places including public parks and playgrounds, churches, banks and zoos. The ban would apply whether the person has a permit to carry a concealed weapon or not. One exception would be for privately owned businesses that put up signs saying people are allowed to bring guns on their premises.
U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney granted a preliminary injunction blocking the law, which he wrote was “sweeping, repugnant to the Second Amendment, and openly defiant of the Supreme Court.”
The court case against the law will proceed while the law is blocked. The judge wrote that gun rights groups are likely to succeed in proving it unconstitutional, meaning it would be permanently overturned.
Stephen Miller doubles down on Trump parroting Hitler’s “poisoning the blood” rhetoric, calling for rounding up Latinos in mass detention camps: People are coming in from different cultures. A generation from now, people will not know the country they’re living in pic.twitter.com/XxVTuhyAKa
Of course it’s Miller who’s put the Nazi talk back into the discourse. Trump doesn’t know from “vermin.” He would just say “rat.” Trump is an instinctive fascist not an ideological one. And that may even be worse:
IN THE DAYS following Donald Trump’s remarks that migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” the 2024 GOP frontrunner was met with a wave of Democratic and media criticism, likening his speech to Nazi rhetoric. In response to the Adolf Hitler comparisons, Trump has privately vowed to further amp up the volume on his extreme, anti-immigrant messaging, according to two sources who’ve spoken to him since his rally in New Hampshire last weekend.
“He wants the media to choke on his words,” one of these sources says. “The [former] president said he’s going to keep doing it, he’s going to keep saying they’re poisoning the blood of the nation and destroying and killing the country … He says it’s a ‘great line.’” (Trump has been publicly using this specific phrase since at least September.)
According to the second source, Trump said in recent days that he was being “too nice” about the “animals” and alleged gang members who cross the southern border, whom Trump routinely accuses of flooding the United States with drugs, diseases, and violent crime. This person relays to Rolling Stone that Trump also said he and his campaign will be rolling out newer, even “tougher” policy proposals on immigration in 2024, and that his supporters should look out for them because they’ll be “very happy.” His current slate of 2024 immigration policy prescriptions include militarizing the southern border to a shocking degree, reimposing and expanding his travel “Muslim ban,” and building a vast network of new detention camps to house undocumented immigrants awaiting deportation.
It is no mystery why Trump’s hard-right, increasingly authoritarian rhetoric and policy promises have become a prime feature of his reelection bid. It’s not just music to the ears of various MAGAdonians, or the logical conclusion of his presidential campaign launch in 2015. It’s because there are more mainstream Republicans now — advising Trump, at influential think tanks and advocacy groups, or in positions of power in the House and Senate and elsewhere — openly embracing and encouraging his rhetoric.
It does appear that the GOP base and establishment are thrilled with all the fascist talk and are clamoring for more.
Between degrees I worked as a waiter. I preferred tips on a credit card. Yes, that made them more reportable. But it also made them bigger. Customers seemed more generous when the cash didn’t come directly out of their wallets. They felt the bite more when they plopped down cash.
Americans’ sense that their personal economy remains unwell may stem from something like that. Great economic data is abstract. Six-dollar boxes of breakfast cereal are not. Nor five dollars for a dozen eggs.
That’s what Americans feel most, The Atlantic‘s Gilad Edelman explains:
Working with Leger, a North American polling firm, we asked 1,005 Americans how they felt about the economy. As with other recent polls, this one painted a gloomy picture. Only 20 percent of people said that the economy has gotten better over the past year, compared with the 44 percent who said it has gotten worse. (There was a big partisan split, but even among self-identified Democrats, only 33 percent said the economy has improved.) Then we asked them to choose, from a long list, what factors they consider when deciding how the national economy is doing. The runaway winner was “The price of groceries for your home”: Twenty-nine percent of people picked it as their top choice, and 60 percent of people selected grocery prices among their top three. Other than “inflation” itself, nothing else came close—not gas, not housing, not interest rates, not the cost of major purchases. And when we asked what people had in mind when they reported that their personal finances were getting worse, 81 percent chose groceries.
Home prices may have skyrocketed during the pandemic, but those negatively impact primarily non-homeowners. Homeowners are richer. On paper.
Polling debunks a couple of theories on why people don’t feel the improved economy: the expiration of the government’s pandemic stimulus and expanded child tax credits. And answers depend on how you ask the questions. If people “were coldly rational” and studied their increased incomes, “they would recognize that their income more than offsets higher grocery prices—they’re spending more, but they still have more left over,” Edelman writes.
But as grocery-buyers, we feel the pinch. So does Edelman:
I should confess that I’m among the many Americans who experience prices as an atmospheric economic condition and income as something I earn. Early in the pandemic, I got in the habit of making an egg-and-cheese sandwich for breakfast pretty much every day. I recall a six-pack of Thomas English muffins costing about $3.50 at the time. Today, one costs $5.59 at my nearest Wegman’s and $5.29 at the nearest Safeway and Harris Teeter. An economist would probably say I shouldn’t worry about it. After all, since the start of the pandemic, I have changed jobs twice, and my income has risen more than enough to easily cover the extra $2 a week on English muffins. Still, I can’t bring myself to buy them. My higher income feels like something I accomplished through hard work and patience, but the higher price of English muffins just feels wrong. I settle for cheaper, inferior brands while waiting in vain for Thomas to go back under $5. (Or I grab them when I’m at Target, where for some reason they’re still only $3.49.) Unlike most poll respondents, I don’t conclude from this that the economy is bad. On the very specific dimension of egg sandwiches, however, I suppose I do feel worse off.
I feel your pain. Blueberries I bought through much of the pandemic recently shot up by half at Harris Teeter. The brand-name cereal I once bought at about $3.59/box is now over $6. Some of Harris Teeter’s store-brand clones are surprisingly good at half the cost. Don’t ask about the price of cookies and lettuce. Eggs are cheaper at Trader Joe’s.
If Joe Biden finally catches a break and wins credit for the improving economy by next fall, you and I, Dear Reader, will feel better off. He just might too. Food inflation if flattening. Consumer sentiment “has made up about half the ground it lost from the eve of the pandemic to its nadir in June 2022.” But those 2019 prices are not coming back. The problem is that grocery prices go up more readily than they come down.
“Personally, I still can’t wrap my head around paying $5.29 for six English muffins,” Edelman says. “Ask me again in six months.”
SCOTUS-watcher Dahlia Lithwick comments on the dilemma in which the Roberts court finds itself. Choose your clichéd metaphor: painted itself into a corner, hoisted on its own petard, shot itself in the foot, chickens coming home, etc.
Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife are just one court soap opera. The fact that conservative funders expend lavish sums to sustain the pair in the style to which they’ve become accustomed makes it clear that both the Federalist Society and SCOTUS conservatives believe justice goes to the highest bidder.
The Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to ban Donald Trump from the state’s primary ballot for engaging in insurrection is on its way to D.C. Thomas will surely not recuse himself from that and other Jan. 6 cases involving players with which his spouse Ginny is closely aligned. This is an imperial court, Lithwick writes, and conservative justices don’t care that we know:
Chief Justice John Roberts has taken care to oversee his legacy on the court, just not very well, as the previous paragraph suggests. What the “amicus brief industrial complex” has sown, etc.
For years, some of the most vocal critics of the court’s ethical lapses, its lack of transparency, and its refusals to take seriously its own brokenness and errors, have warned that the day would come when an election would be decided by a body that has refused to clean house and has blamed the press and the academy for the stench of its own illegitimacy. The worry wasn’t that the court would decide the election; that seems almost inevitable. The worry was that the public, grown weary of the stench, would not abide by their decision.
… When the hyperpolitical supercharged Trump cases catch up with the court—and that is beginning to happen, right now, this week—all that stench will run headlong into the questions about why the husband of the woman who went to the pep rally for the insurrection and the folks who lied to us all about Dobbs are objective enough to decide the outcome of an election. The same people entrusted with the protecting the reputation of the court have blundered into being wholly responsible for protecting democracy. Not one thing suggests they will take the latter any more seriously than they took the former.
“Late-stage capitalism” is another cliché, one native to the left internet. We are where we are as an unhappy society because laissez faire policies promoted since the time of Reagan (or before) have enabled capitalism’s worst instincts to flourish. The driver, what once was called movement conservatism has reached its logical conclusion and, like a cancer, now threatens to kill the host republic that sustains it.
Underlying that movement are imperial impulses far older: feudalism, monarchy, or worse. Some people still yearn for a king. They’ll settle for a dictator.
JV Last has a great piece up today about the Colorado decision that you should read in its entirety. I’ll just excerpt this one part:
Have you ever noticed how, whenever Trump does something terrible, there is always an argument that holding him accountable can only help him?
You can’t impeach him in 2020, because it’ll just make him stronger.
You can’t impeach him in 2021, because you’ll turn him into a martyr.
You can’t raid Mar-a-Lago to take back classified documents, because you’ll rile up his base.
You can’t prosecute him for crimes X, Y, and Z, because it’ll make Republican voters love him more.
There is a strange, self-limiting, helplessness to that thinking: A wicked man does immoral and illegal things—and society’s reaction is to say that we must indulge his depredations, because if we tried to hold him accountable then he would become even worse.
Is there any other aspect of life in which Americans take that view?
That’s not how parents deal with children.
It’s not how regulatory agencies deal with corporations.
And it’s not how the justice system deals with criminals.
The only analogue I can come up with is foreign policy: There have been times when American foreign policy has sought to give foreign dictators what they want in order to prevent them from making more trouble.
I am not an expert, but my impression is that this mode of operation has not often led to good outcomes.
This is one of the most frustrating repetitive dynamics in American politics and it makes me want to scream. It’s as Last writes, “Heads Trump Wins, Tails America Loses.” The reactions last night to the Colorado demonstrated that perfectly. Over and over people said things like this:
Frank Luntz quotes brand new swing state poll from NYT.
‘Colorado will make Trump’s poll numbers rise.’
'Trump is now even more likely to beat Biden.'
The U.S. Supreme Court will settle the 14th Amendment argument once and for all in January.pic.twitter.com/6PXHXni34S
Last also points out how the opposite dynamic applies to Biden: Heads Biden Loses, Tails Trump wins. No matter what the guy accomplishes it’s always, always framed as a problem. This is what we’re up against folks.
The best answer to most of this is “not sure” unless you are a highly educated constitutional scholar or Supreme Court expert. But we all have our uneducated opinions. I’m going with “will reverse” myself. But it’s nice to see that some of the Republicans agree that he committed an insurrection and should be barred though. If they stick with that then Trump will lose.
Of American voters who DISAPPROVE of Biden on Israel-Palestine, per NYT/Siena poll, some think Biden is too supportive of Israel, some think he's too supportive of the Palestinians, but more think his level of support is about right. Yes, that's disapprovers saying "about right." pic.twitter.com/0mkiHVTN6g
This should have been interrogated a little bit more. These people disapprove of Biden’s Israel policy but think his support for Israel and Palestine is about right? I guess they might not think he shouldn’t support of either of them at all but that seems like a stretch. It’s weird question but it should be this confusing.
I think this shows the limitations of polling right now. People are expressing their discontent with Joe Biden on the economy despite telling pollsters their own financial situation is improved and they’re saying they disapprove of his handling of Israel despite the fact that they think he’s gotten the balance between the two warring parties about right. They’re basically saying they disapprove of Joe Biden and it actually has nothing to do with his policies. In fact, they like his policies. They’ve just decided they don’t like him.
I have to assume that some of this (at least among swing voters and Democrats) is about the PTSD dynamic that lingers from the pandemic and also the chaos that Trump and the Republicans constantly cause and which people think Biden is impotent to stop. Everything feels crazy — and the media isn’t helping.
But I also think that polling right now is sloppy, as with this daft question. They were trying to get people to tell them why they disapprove of Biden’s policy but worded it in such a way that probably did more to obscure than enlighten. There’s a lot of that around polling on Biden right now.
Some of this is just another way of saying “Biden’s an old white man and I don’t want to look at that.” I hear it in my personal life all the time. That’s what people see. But they also see Trump who hardly looks like a movie star and is getting weirder looking by the day. So that problem is going to balance itself out as the campaign takes off. And once it does, and other issues emerge, I think more people will be reminded of what they hated about Trump than think his term was the greatest time of their lives.
It seems like this new year can’t get any more turbulent or our political system more volatile. We’re going to have Donald Trump on trial, epic Supreme Court decisions, foreign policy crises and, oh yeah, the most important election of our lives. I’m already reeling with it and I’m sure you are too.
We are living through very, very consequential times. Obviously, the end of the cold war shook everything up after 40 years of a stand-off and the modern conservative movement’s long-term project finally flowering changed our politics. But things have been hurtling at warp speed over the past two decades with an epic terrorist attack that sent the nation into a frenzy and enabled a tragic war from which we still have not fully recovered. The financial crisis of 2008 was the worst economic catastrophe the vast majority of us have ever experienced. (Only the very oldest Americans went through the Great Depression.) The technological revolution of the last few decades is changing our lives so quickly that we can’t keep up from day to day.
And now we are living through the greatest threat to our democracy at least since the civil war and maybe ever. It’s a lot.
I know that people like you who are reading this little old blog and other sites around the internet, trying to keep up with what’s happening and maybe find some perspective are feeling the weight of all this right now. I know I am. But we can’t give up. There is simply no choice. So much depends upon Americans of good will taking a deep breath and girding ourselves for the political battle of our lives.
Donald Trump cannot become president again. It’s simply unthinkable. I don’t care if Joe Biden or a potted plant is his opponent, there is no choice. He must be defeated.
I hope you’ll keep stopping by here over the next year to read what we’ve gathered, synthesized and analyzed on any given day. There’s a lot going on and we can’t claim to be comprehensive but we do try to find information that’s useful in understanding the big picture. And I hope that we provide a little humor and humanity along the way.
If you’d like to help me keep this thing going for another year, you can do that by hitting the buttons below or using the snail mail address on the left. I’m incredibly grateful for your support and am blown away as always that you value this site and keep coming back to see what we have to say. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
Donald Trump keeps sharing a photo on social media featuring a bright-red arrow pointing at the head of a bearded man at his civil fraud trial — claiming he is the son of the judge.
The Post can now confirm that the pictured bespectacled, well-groomed target is not the kin of Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron.
I should know — I’m the guy in the photo.
Trump, 77, on Tuesday yet again signal-boosted the photo of me sitting a few rows into the court gallery along with an article by a fringe-right activist inexplicably claiming Engoron’s son is “financially benefitting” from being given a “prominent” seat at the trial.
The post went out to Trump’s 6.52 million followers on the Truth Social app.
It was the second time within a month that the former president shared the photo of me and a screenshot of the Nov. 7 article from Laura Loomer, an anti-Muslim activist who once described Islam as a “cancer” and has been banned from social media sites in the past.
I was first tipped off to this when Trump shared the post on Truth Social in late November but felt it wasn’t worth giving any air.
But after Trump shared it again Tuesday — and upped the ante by including a comment from famously fact-challenged disgraced ex-Congressman George Santos (R-NY) — I thought it was worth setting the record straight.
Santos had responded to Loomer’s Nov. 7 story with a “fire” emoji and asked his then-colleagues on the House Oversight Committee to “investigate further” the Engoron son situation for possible “misconduct.”
Perhaps that comment was mere misdirection from Santos — who was being probed at the time by a separate House committee, which days later exposed his alleged use of campaign funds on personal splurges such as X-rated OnlyFans subscriptions, Botox and spa treatments.
In an online video, Donald Trump praised the white nationalist conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer as “terrific” and “very special” and said: “You are a very opinionated lady, I have to tell you. And in my opinion, I like that.”
Loomer, 30, is a Florida activist and failed political candidate who once described herself as a “proud Islamophobe”, earning bans from major social media platforms.
Among proliferating controversies, Loomer has called Muslims “savages” and Islam a “cancer”. She has spread conspiracy theories about mass shootings, including the Parkland school shooting in Florida.
Loomer has been closely linked to Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist who, with the rapper Ye, controversially dined with Trump last year.
In April, the New York Times reported that the former president wanted to give Loomer a campaign role. It did not come to pass but she remains a vocal supporter. In the video posted online on Sunday, she said she was making her first visit to Bedminster, Trump’s golf club in New Jersey.
Sitting with the man she called “the greatest president ever”, she said Trump was “killing it right now” in the Republican presidential primary, adding: “You’re crushing it. You’re up over 50 points.”
Trump, 77, said: “It’s great to have you and you are very special and you work hard … I appreciate your support and everybody appreciates your support.”
Loomer said: “Thank you so much for inviting me to sit with you today. It’s a pleasure. You’re the best. I love you.”
Another fascist. Trump reposts her stuff constantly on Truth Social.
They commonly misidentify people online, sometimes so ludicrously you have to laugh. Recently they found a picture of someone who looks a little like John Nichols, liberal columnist for The Nation, at the insurrection and it found its way into one of Trump’s legal filings as evidence that the whole thing was a left wing set-up. It’s that dumb.
I don’t know how important it all is but in the end but it says something about Trump and his followers.I leave it up to you to decide what that is.
