Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Of aliens and alienation

The United States pulled itself together again somehow after the trauma of the Civil War. Or rather, slavery ended formally only to be replaced by a system that rendered the South’s once-enslaved persons free in name only for another 100 years. What persisted was one nation with two systems deeply divided by culture.

Those war’s psychic wounds were thinly disguised behind monuments to the Lost Cause that the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) spent decades planting across indivisible nation. Meanwhile, the Invisible Nation enforced white supremacy for nearly a century. The North won the Civil War, but the South won the peace, at least regionally.

The trauma of electing the country’s first black president in this century reopened the wounds to white pride that never fully healed after Appomattox. Donald Trump, his own psychic wounds worn on the outside, exploited that grievance to win the presidency immediately following Barack Obama’s White House tenure. Talk of a second civil war persists among Trump’s red-hatted brownshirts and did so even before Trump lost reelection in 2020. A New Lost cause was born. Or the old one got a makeover.

Where that leaves our indivisible nation now is anyone’s guess. How long it may take the country to recover from the MAGA insurrection I can only speculate. One wonders if even the appearance of space aliens could knit the country back together the way World War II seemed to, at least for a time.

Susie Madrak of Crooks and Liars posted that she’d recently rewatched Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). It was better than she remembered. I watched it last night, after decades. Susie’s right. It holds up pretty well. Steven Spielberg’s aliens (also E.T. from 1982) are quite a contrast with spiky, stabby black aliens from Apple TV’s series Invasion.

But one doesn’t suppose even a hostile alien invasion could mollify the intra-human grievances of centuries.

The sense of being alien in one’s own home is nurtured among a certain brand of Christian. There is us, the believers, and them, the unsaved tools or allies of the Devil. Or gays or transgenders or liberals or anyone distrusted as not “us.” Outsiderism is a defining identity reinforced in many churches weekly. An old (secular) friend who has worn that identity his entire life once said that if he ever found himself on the inside of some social group, he would have to create an outside just to feel normal.

As for our new(ish) faction of rebels, it is difficult to see how they embrace a common national identity once Trump is gone. Pondering how an even more alien species’ appearance could achieve that brought to mind a scene in “The Last Battle” from the C.S. Lewis Narnia series.

A multicultural society of humans and talking beasts, Narnia has been invaded by the Calormenes. The last Narnians have taken final refuge in a stable. But the dwarves have decided that they can trust no one but themselves. Aslan the lion (Lewis’ Christ figure) appears inside the stable to rescue his faithful, but in their bitterness and cynicism, the dwarves can no longer see him.

As blogger Brenton Dickieson put it:

Their skepticism isn’t just, “I need to be convinced by the evidence,” but “I will not be taken in, so I’ll just stick with my own kind.” 

Readers do not reminding of the MAGA response to the country’s invasion by COVID-19.

The scene plays out:

Aslan raised his head and shook his mane. Instantly a glorious feast appeared on the Dwarfs’ knees: pies and tongues and pigeons and trifles and ices, and each Dwarf had a goblet of good wine in his right hand. But it wasn’t much use. They began eating and drinking greedily enough, but it was clear that they couldn’t taste it properly. They thought they were eating and drinking only the sort of things you might find in a Stable. One said he was trying to eat hay and another said he had got a bit of an old turnip and a third said he’d found a raw cabbage leaf. And they raised golden goblets of rich red wine to their lips and said, ‘Ugh! Fancy drinking dirty water out of a trough that a donkey’s been at! Never thought we’d come to this.’

But very soon every Dwarf began suspecting that every other Dwarf had found something nicer than he had, and they started grabbing and snatching, and went on to quarreling, till in a few minutes there was a free fight and all the good food was smeared on their faces and clothes or trodden under foot.

But when at last they sat down to nurse their black eyes and their bleeding noses, they all said: ‘Well, at any rate, there’s no Humbug here. We haven’t let anyone take us in. The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs!’

‘You see,’ said Aslan. ‘ They will not let us help them. They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they can not be taken out.’

There is no brotherhood of Man for MAGAstan, no solidarity, no coming together, not even in the name of preserving the country, humanity or their own lives. Their prison is their own minds.

And a grifter gets his gig

It’s football season and all the players and coaches are back on the field:

But Joe Kennedy won’t be among them. The assistant coach of the Bremerton High School football team in Washington state quit his job after participating in just one game last week. Kennedy’s employment status is generally not worthy of national attention on its own terms. This particular coach, however, waged an eight-year legal battle to reclaim that job and got the Supreme Court to reshape the balance between church and state in public schools along the way. He won the case, he got his job back, and then he quit almost immediately.

I have written before about the Supreme Court’s tendency in recent years to take what I have charitably described as “phantom docket” cases. But these might be more simply described as fake: They rest upon nebulous theories of standing, hypothetical injuries, and right-wing causes célèbre. Phantom-docket cases have allowed the court’s conservative majority to rewrite precedents while avoiding any immediate real-world consequences of their rulings. Yet even by those standards, Kennedy’s case might be the most phantasmal of them all.

The basic course of events was as follows. Kennedy worked as a part-time assistant football coach in Bremerton. He often prayed before and after football games, at first silently by himself and then with students. After the school district learned of the prayers with students many years later, they conducted an inquiry into the practice and, fearing litigation, tried to get him to hold nondisruptive private prayers instead. He eventually chose to hold public prayers with media figures and elected officials in defiance of the district’s requests.

After this escalation, the district put Kennedy on paid administrative leave and the head coach recommended that he not be rehired next season because of the disruptions he had caused. Kennedy declined to reapply for his job, then sued the school district for violating his First Amendment rights to free speech and religious practice. In those legal proceedings, Kennedy framed his case as one of a humble football coach whose quiet prayers were squelched by a hostile school district.

“The decision below reached the remarkable conclusion that the Constitution prohibits what it protects twice over,” he explained in his petition for review for the Supreme Court, referring to the lower-court rulings against him. “Petitioner Joseph Kennedy is a former football coach at a public high school who lost his job after kneeling at the 50-yard line after a high school football game to say a brief, quiet prayer of gratitude.”

This version of events was a powerful and apparently irresistible narrative for legal conservatives. Secular school administrators punishing a small-town high school football coach for quietly praying after a game is potent imagery, evoking a wistful Americana that is now threatened by godless liberalism. Unsurprisingly, conservative jurists went out of their way to denounce the school district for its actions and side with Kennedy at every stage of the case.

Judge Diarmund O’Scannlain, the dean of the conservative wing on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, wrote an impassioned dissent from that court’s refusal to reconsider a panel’s ruling against Kennedy. The panel’s ruling, he claimed, “obliterates” Kennedy’s First Amendment rights “by announcing a new rule that any speech by a public school teacher or coach, while on the clock and in earshot of others, is subject to plenary control by the government.

“Indeed, we are told that, from the moment public high school football coach Joseph Kennedy arrives at work until the very last of his players has gone home after a game, the Free Speech Clause simply doesn’t apply to him,” O’Scannlain continued. He framed the situation in stark, minimalist terms: “Kennedy lost his coaching job because he refused to abandon his practice of kneeling on the field and uttering a prayer after each football game.”

But this interpretation of events, O’Scannlain’s colleagues noted, left out important context. Judge Milan Smith, a George W. Bush appointee, described at length how his colleague had omitted essential details and framed what happened in misleading terms. Kennedy, he noted, was not merely offering silent, private prayers but engaging in a much larger religious activity with students under his supervision and even coaches and players from other schools. Moreover, even as the school district tried to accommodate Kennedy’s religious practices, Kennedy chose to escalate them into a spectacle by declaring that he would pray in the middle of the football field immediately after the October 26 game.

“He advertised in the area’s largest newspaper, and local and national TV stations, that he intended to defy BSD’s instructions not to publicly pray with his players while still on duty even though he said he might lose his job as a result,” Smith recounted. “As he said he would, Kennedy prayed out loud in the middle of the football field immediately after the conclusion of the first game after his lawyer’s letter was sent, surrounded by players, members of the opposing team, parents, a local politician, and members of the news media with television cameras recording the event, all of whom had been advised of Kennedy’s intended actions through the local news and social media.”

Smith then chastised his colleagues by name for falling for Kennedy’s self-serving stories. “Unlike Odysseus, who was able to resist the seductive song of the Sirens by being tied to a mast and having his shipmates stop their ears with bees’ wax, our colleague, Judge O’Scannlain, appears to have succumbed to the Siren song of a deceitful narrative of this case spun by counsel for appellant, to the effect that Joseph Kennedy, a Bremerton High School (BHS) football coach, was disciplined for holding silent, private prayers,” Smith wrote in a concurring opinion from the Ninth Circuit’s refusal to rehear the case. “That narrative is false.”

Ultimately, the Supreme Court proved just as unable—or perhaps just as unwilling—to look beyond the falsehoods spun by Kennedy and his lawyers. Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority, described the saga in the opening paragraph of his majority opinion in almost unrecognizable terms—unrecognizable, that is, unless your understanding of the case’s facts comes entirely from Kennedy’s own briefs.

“Joseph Kennedy lost his job as a high school football coach because he knelt at midfield after games to offer a quiet prayer of thanks,” Gorsuch wrote, about events that never took place. “Mr. Kennedy prayed during a period when school employees were free to speak with a friend, call for a reservation at a restaurant, check email, or attend to other personal matters. He offered his prayers quietly while his students were otherwise occupied. Still, the Bremerton School District disciplined him anyway.”

Along the way, Gorsuch used the opportunity to overturn Lemon v. Kurtzman, a Supreme Court ruling in 1971 that set up what was known as the “Lemon test” for establishment clause cases. Conservatives have long opposed the ruling on multiple grounds, including for the allegedly short shrift it gives to religious practices. In its place, Gorsuch emphasized the conservative majority’s preferred replacement test, which instead commands that “the Establishment Clause must be interpreted by reference to historical practices and understandings.”

The court’s liberal justices, like their lower-court colleagues, did not hesitate to call out the majority for the misleading portrayal of Kennedy’s case. “To the degree the Court portrays petitioner Joseph Kennedy’s prayers as private and quiet, it misconstrues the facts,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for herself and the other two dissenters. “The record reveals that Kennedy had a longstanding practice of conducting demonstrative prayers on the 50-yard line of the football field. Kennedy consistently invited others to join his prayers and for years led student athletes in prayer at the same time and location. The Court ignores this history.”

To underscore that point, Sotomayor included three photographs of Kennedy’s activities that clearly show him leading prayer circles with students and opposing-team players. She chastised the majority for its blinkered view of the case, which stripped out the context that made the school district’s concern about an establishment clause violation much more credible. She noted, for example, that several parents had later contacted the school district to say that their children only participated in the prayers because they felt obligated to do so. (Coercion is a well-established red line in school prayer cases.)

Kennedy’s grandstanding, Sotomayor pointed out, had also thrown the school’s football program into turmoil. “The head coach himself also resigned after 11 years in that position, expressing fears that he or his staff would be shot from the crowd or otherwise attacked because of the turmoil created by Kennedy’s media appearances,” Sotomayor noted. “Three of five other assistant coaches did not reapply.”

To make things even more awkward, Kennedy no longer even lived in Washington state by the time his case had reached the Supreme Court. He had since relocated to Florida, calling into question whether he even wanted his old job back. When asked by The New York Times last spring about relocating to the state furthest from Washington, Kennedy insisted he would be on the “very first flight back” and was eager to return to his old job. “The biggest honor of my life was coaching these young men,” Kennedy told the Times. “No lie, we had blood, sweat, tears and death in the Marine Corps, but I got way more out of coaching than anything else in my life.”

Last month, however, his tune had changed. Kennedy told NBC News that while he felt a duty to return after the long legal fight, he had a new life in Florida to live as well. That new life brought him a much greater degree of prominence than he had before the case. Kennedy’s book about the saga is coming out later this year, complete with a book tour. He claimed that Ron DeSantis, with whom he said he’d recently had dinner, had asked him to support his presidential campaign, but Kennedy declined because his “loyalty is to [Donald] Trump.” Coaching high school football is no match for being “the praying coach” who took on secularism and won. The life of a right-wing folk hero can be a busy (and profitable) one.

This is not to say that Kennedy was obligated to work as a high school football coach forever after the Supreme Court’s ruling. Indeed, it is to his credit that he even went back to coach a single game at all. It would have been much simpler to take the victory and move on. But refusing to coach another game would have deprived this entire charade of the fig leaf it so desperately needed.[…]

One of the most important limits on the Supreme Court’s power is that, under the Constitution, it can only hear actual “cases and controversies.” The justices can’t just wake up one morning and say X is constitutional and Y is not. They can’t issue advisory opinions based on what they think might happen or should happen. Someone has to bring them a real case with real stakes and real adversaries. Kennedy’s case shows how easily that check on their power can be obliterated if the justices want it to disappear, and how much they can reshape American law once it’s gone. All it takes is a story that is, both literally and figuratively, too good to be true.

Maybe he can join Kyle Rittenhouse on the wingnut hustle circuit. I’m sure he’ll make more money than he ever did as a part time high school football coach which may have been the plan all along. It was an excellent career move.

They’re soon to be responsible for 20 million deaths

Anti-abortion Republicans would have you believe that they are all about preserving life. We know that isn’t true by their blood-thirsty attitude about anyone they consider an enemy but this takes it to another level:

The AIDS epidemic has killed more than 40 million people since the first recorded cases in 1981, tripling child mortality and carving decades off life expectancy in the hardest-hit areas of Africa, where the cost of treatment put it out of reach. Horrified, then-President George W. Bush and the U.S. Congress two decades ago created what is described as the largest commitment by any nation to combat a single disease.

The program, known as the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, partners with nonprofit groups to provide HIV/AIDS medication to millions around the world. It strengthens local and national health care systems, cares for children orphaned by AIDS and provides job training for people at risk.

Now, a few Republican lawmakers are endangering the stability of the program, which officials say has saved 25 million lives in 55 countries from Ukraine to Brazil to Indonesia. That includes the lives of 5.5 million infants born HIV-free.

At the Catholic-run Nairobi orphanage, program manager Paul Mulongo has a message for Washington.

“Let them know that the lives of these children we are taking care of are purely in their hands,” Mulongo says.

The issue of abortion has been a sensitive one since PEPFAR’s inception in 2003. But each time the program came up for renewal in Congress, Republicans and Democrats were able to put aside partisan politics to support a program that’s long been seen as the vanguard of global aid.

“Most eras in countries are measured by loss of life in war and famine and pandemic,” said Tom Hart, president of the ONE Campaign, a nonpartisan organization that worked with Bush, a Republican, to create the program. “This era has been measured in lives saved.” The campaign has published a letter from dozens of faith leaders to Congress calling PEPFAR “a story of medical miracles and mercy.”

But the bipartisan support is cracking as the program is set to expire at the end of September. The trouble began in the spring, when the Heritage Foundation, an influential conservative Washington think tank, accused the Biden administration of using PEPFAR “to promote its domestic radical social agenda overseas.”

The group pointed to new State Department language that called for PEPFAR to partner with organizations that advocate for “institutional reforms in law and policy regarding sexual, reproductive and economic rights of women.” Conservatives argued that’s code for trying to integrate abortion with HIV/AIDS prevention, a claim the administration has denied.

In language echoing the early, harsh years of the epidemic, Heritage called HIV/AIDS a “lifestyle disease” that should be suppressed by “education, moral suasion and legal sanctions.” It recommended halving U.S. funding for PEPFAR, saying poor countries should bear more of the costs.

Shortly after that, U.S. Rep. Chris Smith, a longtime supporter of PEPFAR who wrote the bill reauthorizing it in 2018, said he would not move forward with reauthorization this time unless it barred nongovernmental organizations that used any funding to provide or promote abortion services. The threat from the New Jersey Republican threat comes with weight: He chairs the U.S. House Foreign Affairs subcommittee with jurisdiction over the program’s funding.

Because that proposal faces stiff opposition from congressional Democrats, Smith, with support from prominent anti-abortion groups, wants to cut PEPFAR’s usual five-year funding to one year if that ban is not included. He said that would allow lawmakers annually to revisit contracts with partners they believe may support or provide abortion services.

“It’s a false narrative that says that you can’t do (the program) year by year as we try to protect the unborn child,” Smith told The Associated Press.

Supporters of the program say that under existing U.S. law, partners are already prohibited from using its funding for abortion services. The head of PEPFAR, John Nkengasong, told the AP he knew of no instance of the program’s money going directly or indirectly to fund abortion services.

He warned that any instability in the flow of U.S. funding for PEPFAR could have dangerous implications for health globally, including in the United States. The key to controlling AIDS, he said, is the assurance that infected people have a pill to take each day.

Without that, the virus could come back, ”and about 20 million lives might be lost in the coming years,” he said. “The fragile gains that we’ve achieved will be lost.”

This was the one truly good thing George W. Bush ever did and it goes some way to mitigate at least some of his otherwise awful legacy. Now they’re going to toss that on the garbage heap along with anything else the Republicans ever did that might be considered decent. (There isn’t much.) I don’t know if Chris Smith is vulnerable in his N.J. district but if he is the Democrats should move heavily against him,

The “America First” Republicans don’t believe in any kind of foreign aid to anyone they don’t like. I’m sure they’d send it to Russia if they could, but African countries (or “shit-hole” countries as Trump referred to them)? No way.

The NY Times on rich GOPer hand wringing:

On Labor Day, Eric Levine, a New York lawyer and Republican fund-raiser, sent an email to roughly 1,500 donors, politicians and friends.

“I refuse to accept the proposition that Donald Trump is the ‘inevitable’ Republican nominee for President,” he wrote. “His nomination would be a disaster for our party and our country.”

Many of the Republican Party’s wealthiest donors share that view, and the growing sense of urgency about the state of the G.O.P. presidential primary race. Mr. Trump’s grip on the party’s voters is as powerful as ever, with polls in Iowa and New Hampshire last month putting him at least 25 percentage points above his nearest rivals.

That has left major Republican donors — whose desires have increasingly diverged from those of conservative voters — grappling with the reality that the tens of millions of dollars they have spent to try to stop the former president, fearing he poses a mortal threat to their party and the country, may already be a sunk cost.

Interviews with more than a dozen Republican donors and their allies revealed hand-wringing, magical thinking, calls to arms and, for some, fatalism. Several of them did not want to be identified by name out of a fear of political repercussions or a desire to stay in the good graces of any eventual Republican nominee, including Mr. Trump.

“If things don’t change quickly, people are going to despair,” Mr. Levine said in an interview. He is among the optimists who believe Mr. Trump’s support is not as robust as the polls suggest and who see a quickly closing window to rally behind another candidate. In Mr. Levine’s 2,500-word Labor Day missive, he urged his readers to pick Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina.

Other schools of thought exist. Some donors have backed Mr. Trump’s rivals despite believing that he is unbeatable in the primaries. These donors are banking, in part, on the chance that Mr. Trump will eventually drop out of the race because of his legal troubles, a health scare or some other personal or political calculation.

[…]

Privately, many donors said that the primary contest so far — especially the first Republican debate last month, in which Mr. Trump did not take part — had felt like a dress rehearsal for a play that would never happen. One donor’s political adviser called it “the kids’ table.”

One Texas-based Republican fund-raiser, who has not committed to a candidate and insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations, said he regularly told major donors that like it or not, Mr. Trump would be the nominee.

“Intellectually, their heads explode,” the fund-raiser said. He said many donors were “backing off” rather than supporting a candidate, reflecting a fundamental belief that nobody can defeat Mr. Trump.

Large-dollar Republican donors, even those who enthusiastically or reluctantly backed Mr. Trump in 2016 and 2020, have made no secret of their wish to move on in 2024.

They supported him in 2016 and 2020 and they expected that there would be no lasting consequences? That the GOP electorate Trump and the right wing media convinced that know-nothing transgressive politics were a winner would suddenly shove all the ugliness and corruption back under a rock and go back to pretending they weren’t a bunch of bigots and nihilists? Well, that didn’t happen, did it?

And I’m quite sure they will “reluctantly” support him again. Because they are no better. In fact, they are worse because they had the power to do something about this and they didn’t because in their minds anything was better than supporting a Democrat who might try to raise their taxes or regulate their businesses. They own this situation as much as vile Trump.

I don’t know if you have the stomach for it, but this appearance by Alex Jones on Russian TV is not only bizarre it’s shockingly pro-Russia, even beyond what we’ve come to expect from the American right. (If you watch it, turn off the sound and just read the closed captions.)

Both of these people are clowns, of course, and it’s hard to imagine anyone taking them seriously. But I guess it shows that we aren’t the only culture that has such batshit crazy political media stars.

Still, maybe I’m showing my age but it’s still stunning to me to see an American right wing figure kowtowing and pandering to a Russian audience, begging them to understand just how much America really supports them and their aims. I never thought I’d see the day.

Vivek lies even more flamboyantly than he does

Okaaay:

HASAN: “You say [Trump] behaved in downright abhorrent behavior that makes him a danger to democracy. What was it that was downright … tell me what he did that was downright abhorrent.”

RAMASWAMY: “Let’s actually be really fair to your audience. So on Jan. 10, 2021, thereabouts, days after that incident, I wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal arguing that censorship was the real cause of what happened on Jan. 6. …”

HASAN: “Which isn’t true …”

RAMASWAMY: “… Well, that’s what I wrote. I’m giving you the facts of what I said. That’s a hard fact. That was published in The Wall Street Journal.”

 CNN’s Daniel Dale fact-checked said facts, and surprise!

Ramaswamy’s claim is false. He never argued in The Wall Street Journal op-ed that censorship was the real cause of the January 6 riot. Rather, Ramaswamy and his co-author criticized social media companies for banning Trump and some of his supporters in the days after the riot. They argued that social media companies are violating the Constitution when they censor users, and they warned that Silicon Valley stifling the voices of disaffected Americans would lead to future “terror” that would make the Capitol riot look peaceful by comparison. They never argued in the op-ed that censorship was even a partial cause of the January 6 riot – which they described as “disgraceful,” “last week’s horror” and “a stain on American history” – let alone its primary cause.

He’s slick but not that slick.

By the way, did I say he lied more flamboyantly than Trump? Never mind:

All of that is a lie. All of it. Completely made up from beginning to end with no basis in fact whatsoever.

There have been over 13 million new jobs during the first two years, Biden never said he was a fighter pilot or that he has a 6 handicap. But you can bet Trump’s cult and Fox News will have at least half of America believing it’s true just because he said it. (I say at least half because according to the polls, more than 60% of people believe the lies about “the Biden Crime Family” so clearly there are a bunch of Democrats and Independents who believe this bilge too.)

What is it Emily’s List says? Early Money Is Like Yeast?

So, perhaps, are early branding ads.

In preparing the ground ahead of the next election, Democrats’ efforts always seem too little and too late. But with Biden’s low approval numbers, Democrats and their allies are not waiting to give their candidate a boost (Politico):

The cavalry is arriving extraordinarily early for President Joe Biden.

With poll after brutal poll showing the president in danger of losing a likely rematch with former President Donald Trump, his campaign is getting an unusual boost from a super PAC spending millions of dollars to resuscitate public opinion of him in major battlegrounds.

The ads are striking for both their timing and their content.

The election is still 423 days away, and Biden and an affiliate of his chief super PAC are already running TV ads in nearly every major battleground state — far earlier than normal for a presidential election. And instead of going on the attack, as super PACs usually do, the ads are trying to boost Biden’s image.

Future Forward USA Action, an arm of the top super PAC backing Biden’s reelection bid, is spending more than $12 million on an ad campaign that began Friday in the biggest markets of six major battleground states. That puts the outside group and the campaign — which is a month into its own sustained ad campaign — on the air earlier than Trump and his allies began advertising in earnest for the 2020 election, for example.

There’s another Future Forward ad I can’t embed here.

Biden and Future Forward are on the air already in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — battleground states.

Oh yes, we’ve seen them here in North Carolina too.

Biden’s campaign is also advertising in North Carolina, which voted for Trump by 1.3 points in 2020. Thanks to its growing population, North Carolina now has more electoral votes (16) than Michigan (15) for the first time since Reconstruction and now has the same weight as Georgia.

But it’s Politico, so good news is always bad news for Democrats:

But Biden and his allies have a long way to go to convince voters his policies have made the economy better, despite some positive jobs and gross domestic product data recently. According to a new CNN/SSRS poll this week, a majority of Americans, 58 percent, think Biden’s policies have worsened economic conditions in the country, up from 50 percent when CNN asked the question last October.

Only about a quarter of respondents, 24 percent, said Biden’s policies had improved the economy, while another 18 percent said they’ve had no impact.

But the key to shifting those perceptions (if you haven’t heard it before) is simplicity itself:

And starting early for a change is smart. It takes time.

Biden’s is also making sure women know who has their backs … and who doesn’t.

What your votes will decide in 2024

What’s on the 2024 ballot appears every day in stark terms.

Women’s rights

Republicans also have a “Fugitive Slave Woman Acts” problem to add to the list above.

Climate change

CNN: At least 14 people have died and several remain missing across Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria as torrential rain and severe flooding batter southern Europe.

Gun violence

Another typical day in America:

Albuquerque police say a road rage shooting left an 11-year-old boy dead Wednesday night after he and his family left Isotopes Park.

As the boy and his family were driving away from the park, their vehicle pulled in front of another vehicle, according to APD Chief Harold Medina.

That vehicle made a U-turn and confronted the family on Avenida Cesar Chavez, Medina said. Then, someone in the suspect vehicle fired 17 shots at the family’s vehicle before reportedly leaving the area.

Ms Magazine:

In 2023 the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School found that “40 percent of young Americans are concerned about being victims of gun violence or mass shootings. One in three are concerned about someone close to them being a victim of gun violence or a mass shooting.”

This guy (or someone like him)

Don’t get mad, get busy.

Meerkat mob!

Six fluffy bundles of joy have arrived at Taronga Western Plains Zoo in Dubbo, with the Zoo’s Meerkat mob welcoming its second litter of pups for 2023.

Mum Midra gave birth to six pups on Wednesday 2nd August, and while the pups are yet to be sexed or named, keeper Rez Onay said they’re doing well.

“Coming in each morning and seeing the pups, it’s the best part of the day,” Rez said.

They’re very cute and our main job is watching the behaviour of the family, making sure everyone is happy and well and looking after the new arrivals.

“The family is doing a great job of looking after the pups, who are putting on weight and getting more active each and every day.”

These arrivals bring the total number of meerkats at the Zoo to 20, including 14 in the breeding group at The Waterhole. Parents Midra and Howell have their hands full, with 10 pups under six months of age.

Meerkats can fall pregnant as soon as one week after giving birth, or once the pups are weaned at about eight weeks of age, so it’s not unusual for them to give birth again so soon,” Rez said.

“It’s really important in the meerkat mob for everyone to take turns babysitting; even the four pups we had earlier this year have taken on big brother and sister roles and are doing an amazing job looking after everyone, making sure that Mum and Dad are getting the food and rest that they need.”

The pups can now be seen in the meerkat habitat at The Waterhole, however the mob is protectively keeping them out of sight while they are so small – weighing just 70 grams!

“The best time to see the pups will be when they are about 4-5 weeks of age, when they’re a little bit more adventurous and exploring their exhibit!”

The Meerkats at Taronga Western Plains Zoo are ambassadors for their wild counterparts. While Meerkats are classed as ‘least concern’ by the ICUN, they still play a vital role in maintaining the ecological harmony of their desert homes by eating an insect rich diet.

Courtesy Zooborns