FKA Twitter exploded on Friday after another of those inexplicable New York Times headlines for which the paper has become known of late. The digital din was such that editors have since altered it.
Imagine Tocqueville-style visitor to US of 2024 who travels around the country and concludes, “This is a nation consumed by war.”
—In comparison w times that *was* true: eg 1968 (and 1964-1975), 2001-2005 (and onward), Nov 1962, Feb 1991 (Gulf War), etc. Not to mention 1940s, early 1950s, etc.
—In comparison to what dominates airwaves + news cycles + campaign speeches: Immigration, inflation, abortion, voting and justice systems, “culture wars” + DEI, future of both parties, climate, taxes, etc.
This era’s wars are of profound importance. But “nation consumed”? (As so often the case, hed oversells the actual story. But headlines are all that most people ever see.)
Ukraine is a nation consumed by war; Russia as well to a very real extent. Gaza is consumed by war; Israel to a real extent is consumed by war.
The New York Times, once a newspaper of record, is consumed by journalistic malpractice and malfeasance.
The article by Michael Crowley quotes Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace saying, “although the United States is not directly involved in the wars in Ukraine or Gaza, the risks of large-scale conflict have become higher.”
The rest of the article suggests that war has defined the Biden presidency and that a “wartime mood” pervades Washington. That’s not a sense one gets from watching any coverage. Is the world more unstable? Surely. Are Americans consumed by it? Their attention is more fixed upon the economy, health care, and immigration. And on the fate of democracy.
Fear is the fuel upon which GOP election-year hopes depends. The joy erupting among Democrats over the Harris-Walz campaign is loudly dousing it. Perhaps the Times with its “consumed by war” framing felt the need to tip the playing field back in Donald Trump’s direction.
But Trump considers the press the “enemy of the people.” That includes the Times. Should Trump win in November, placating him won’t save them from what comes next.
Reflecting on the Times headline, Brian Beutler tweeted:
A lot going on over there, but one subtle contributing factor is that in a professional culture where critical thinking is discouraged (don’t form opinions on issues, etc) analytical muscles atrophy, and these reported takes come out braindead.
One X user speculated that Rupert Murdoch was preparing to buy the newspaper of record.
Babs’ snowballs had their first checkup! Hogle Zoo’s teams, joined by MedVet doctors, gave vaccinations & eye exams to the cubs. One cub weighs 4.6 lbs, the other 4.2 lbs. They are in great health, and guests can expect to visit them this fall. Read more: https://t.co/C5BfSmAf5kpic.twitter.com/oreD58gLo3
Resident snow leopard cubs at Utah’s Hogle Zoo had their first 8-week veterinary checkup on July 31, 2024.
Hogle Zoo’s animal care and veterinary teams were joined by an ophthalmologist from MedVet to conduct the wellness exam. This 8-week checkup is a routine practice that allows our teams to evaluate the two cubs’ overall health.
Dr. Lauren Smith, DVM, Dipl. ACZM, one of the zoo’s veterinarians, conducted a comprehensive health examination on the cubs, which included assessing their body conditions and administering necessary vaccinations. Dr. Jaycie Riesberg, an ophthalmologist from MedVet, performed detailed eye exams, and both cubs’ eyes looked great. Eye exams are a unique practice to snow leopards, who are especially prone to ocular issues. The animal care staff also weighed the cubs, with one weighing 4.6 lbs and the other 4.2 lbs.
Since their birth in early June, the two cubs have stayed close to their mom without keeper intervention. This time behind-the-scenes was especially helpful for Babs, a very protective first-time mom, as it provided ample bonding time for the new family. Keepers also had time to slowly build Babs’ existing trust and training so she would feel comfortable while her cubs were away during their exams.
The 8-week checkup, standard timing to receive their first set of vaccinations, was the first time our animal care and veterinary teams have been hands-on with the cubs.
After the checkup, the cubs were given a “straw bath,” covered in substrate with scents familiar to their mom to help them reunite calmly and comfortably. Both cubs did very well and are in great health!
They’ll receive two more rounds of vaccinations before guests can expect to see them this fall. During this time behind-the-scenes, keepers are building trusting relationships with the cubs and beginning early training to help them participate in their future care. The animal care team is also assessing and modifying the cubs’ future outdoor habitats to ensure they can safely explore and navigate the space.
Thanks to our amazing teams and partners for their commitment to care, and congratulations to the amazing first-time mom Babs on a clean bill of health for both her cubs.
#OnThisDay Aug. 9, 1974 President Nixon delivers farewell address to staffers: "Always give your best. Never get discouraged. Never be petty. Always remember others may hate you but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself." pic.twitter.com/p6pQz1AQ6w
He was a corrupt monster. But at least he wasn’t an imbecile and had the good grace to see the writing on the wall. Of course, if he’d had Fox News and a Supreme Court like this one I have little doubt that he never would have resigned. He was smart enough to know after that Supreme Court ruling on the tapes and the collapse of GOP support he had no choice. That wouldn’t have happened today.
It hasn’t happened today and Trump is a thousand times more corrupt than Nixon and ten times as monstrous. The only thing saving us is his ignorance and at this point that doesn’t even matter.
Trump once again ranted and raved about Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan being the worst decision a president has ever made in his press conference yesterday. He is, as always, completely full of it.
Lost amidst Trump’s rambling incoherence about Afghanistan today is the fact that he negotiated the withdrawal of U.S. forces with the Taliban, not Biden.
Here are the facts about how Biden was handed a giant mess from Trump in Afghanistan.
Trump had boxed Biden in. If Biden reneged on that agreement, Taliban attacks on American servicemembers would have restarted, forcing us to send thousands more troops back into the conflict. Very few Americans would have supported this endless commitment.
The reality is that U.S. military intervention was never going to be successful in standing up an American-style democracy and an American-style military in Afghanistan. 20 years and more than $2 trillion dollars trying to achieve it was enough.
Then as our troop departure – negotiated by Trump – drew closer, the Afghan government and military collapsed without warning. It is not plausible to hold Biden responsible for that. That was a decision made by panicked Afghan leaders.
That collapse would have happened whether Trump or Biden was President. Frankly, Biden performed admirably under the circumstances, organizing the largest post war non-combatent evacuation in our nation’s history.
Trump set in motion the withdrawal in a way that Biden could not reverse. It’s just not true Trump would have managed the withdrawal better. Undoubtedly he would have handled it like he handled every other crisis – disastrously
Murphy is too polite to note that the media (I’m looking at you, Tapper) played a huge part in pushing Trump’s disinformation with their hand wringing over the withdrawal as if both Trump and Biden had never promised to do it (Biden being the only one to actually fulfill it) and suddenly deciding that it was the wrong thing to do. Their breathless reporting was journalistic malpractice and it gave Trump the ability to use it as a cudgel against Biden when it was his incompetence that caused it. Unforgivable.
In fairness, LaCivita was cutely suggesting that the Democrats were the ones who were going to contest the election of Trump rather than the other way around. But I think we know the reality of that statement, don’t we? Joe Biden certainly does:
Speaking to CBS News’s Robert Costa this week, President Joe Bidenoffered a pessimistic assessment of the aftermath of this year’s presidential election. “If [Donald] Trump loses, I’m not confident at all” that there would be a peaceful transfer of power, Biden said. “He means what he says. We don’t take him seriously. He means it, all the stuff about, ‘If we lose, there’ll be a bloodbath, it’ll have to be a stolen election.’”
The “bloodbath” comment to which Biden refers was offered at a Trump rally this year and, in context, appeared to refer to theoretical economic damage from Trump not returning to the White House. But the latter part of Biden’s comment, about how Trump is likely to frame any loss as a function of illegality, is unquestionably on the mark. It’s what he did in 2020, as you’re no doubt aware, and two-thirds of Republicans still tell pollsters that they think Biden’s win that year was somehow illegitimate. More than a third of Republicans say there’s solid evidence Biden didn’t win, which — despite four years of feverish looking — there isn’t.
It’s not clear that there’s any way to ensure that Trump’s supporters accept a loss this time around, either.
[…]
Pew Research Center polling conducted last month found that fewer than half of Republicans believed that the election would be “conducted fairly and accurately.” Recent YouGov polling, conducted for the Economist, determined that 8 in 10 Trump supporters think that he will defeat Harris in the election. Should Harris prevail, is it more likely that those Trump supporters will accept the defeat or that they will assume the election wasn’t fair and accurate?
A separate poll conducted by YouGov for the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University determined that about 30 percent of Republicans who felt the 2020 election was stolen anticipate significant political violence after the election. That poll also found that a lot of Americans are concerned about misinformation — none more than those who reject the 2020 results.
“Republicans who believe Trump won in 2020 are more concerned about misinformation than any other group surveyed,” Johns Hopkins’s Hannah Robbins notes, “and believe ‘liberal media’ are responsible.”
Now you’ve got honest election officials who stood up for the truth last time being drummed out of their jobs either through threats and intimidation or primary elections. And in places around the country, Georgia notably just this week, we see changes to the laws which will allow Trump cronies and GOP henchmen to overturn a legitimate election of Harris with bogus charges of voter fraud and then certify Trump as the rightful winner even though he lost.
The odds are low that Trump would be able to seize power in the event of such a loss. But, as we saw in January 2021, that’s not the only possible negative consequence of his supporters thinking without evidence that the election was stolen.
I’m not sure the odds are as low as he suggests. We don’t know what the courts would do in the event of a state certification crisis. After all, the Supremes intervened in 2000 on behalf of Bush. Three of the justices were appointed by Trump and three of them worked for Bush in that earlier case. Do we really believe that they won’t do it again after what we’ve seen recently?
First things first, of course. Win the election. But nobody should be sanguine that the post election period won’t be complete chaos with an unpredictable outcome. This is what Trump has wrought.
Donald Trump is in a bad way. His campaign has completely lost its bearings with the withdrawal of Joe Biden and the ecstatic reception of the Kamala Harris-Tim Walz ticket among the Democratic faithful. He is so upset about losing Biden as his opponent that he’s even taken to posting freaky fan-fic on his Truth Social Platform, hopefully suggesting that Biden is going to storm the convention and take back the nomination:
Some of that is a classic “I know you are but what am I” Trump set-up to rationalize a loss in November. He’s going to say the Democrats staged a coup and usurped the Constitution by replacing Joe Biden on the ballot. It’s laughably absurd but it will soothe him to say it and give his followers something to hang on to.
But it’s also obvious that he just can’t wrap his mind around the fact that he has to run against Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. It’s so confusing to him that he can’t even leave Mar-a-lago anymore. While the Democratic nominees are barnstorming the country with Trump’s VP choice JD Vance trailing behind them with pathetic stunts, Trump himself is doing just one rally this week — in an irrelevant deep red state that he will certainly win.
Philip Bump of the Washington Post has the numbers showing how much he has slowed down:
Trump is holding far fewer rallies than he did in 2016 and has held far fewer public appearances than he did in 2020, the two previous times he sought the presidency.
A review of Trump’s activities in July and August of those previous years shows the difference. From July 1 to Aug. 10, 2016, Trump held 22 rallies, including six days on which he held multiple rallies. Over the rest of August, he added 15 more rallies. This year, he’s held seven rallies with another scheduled for Friday in Montana.
One might guess that he is still spooked from the assassination attempt and fears being back out there but he wasn’t campaigning much even before that. He just doesn’t seem to think he needs to do it because, as he tells his people, he believes that the votes are already there and the main job of the campaign is “election integrity” which translates to suppressing the Democratic vote and contesting the results if he loses.
Nonetheless, he’s obviously agitated over the Harris’s massive small donor fundraising haul over the past couple of weeks which he knows very well is indicative of tremendous enthusiasm for their ticket. (He’s drained his own small donors dry over the past eight years.) And polls showing her taking the lead are driving him to distraction.
According to his former communications director, Stephanie Grisham he’s decided to take matters into his own hands:
Re: Trump’s self-announced press conference today at 2 pm: He’s panicking. I’ve seen this play many times. He thinks his team is failing him & no one can speak better/“save” his campaign/defend him but him. He hates the coverage Harris is getting & thinks only he can fix it.
The questions at the presser couldn’t be heard because of the poor production at Mar-a-lago, but from what we could tell the reporters were extremely polite and demanded no follow-ups which was nice for him. Some of the questions sounded like they might have even been asked by members of his own staff.
For instance, when someone threw him a red meat question about whether former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown dating Harris back in the 1990s had helped her career, Trump told a wild tale about almost dying in a helicopter with him and that Brown had told him “terrible things” about Harris and was “not a fan.” (This is not the first time Trump has made these crude suggestions about her.)
Willie Brown told the New York Times he’s never been in a helicopter with Trump and that he never disparaged Harris to him. It seems that Trump had mistaken Willie Brown with former California Gov. Jerry Brown who did take a helicopter flight with him and Gov. Gavin Newsom to inspect fire damage a few years back. They didn’t speak of Kamala Harris and the helicopter was never in any danger but Newsom recalls Trump incessantly wondering if it might crash.
Oddly, no members of the media are angrily demanding to see Trump’s medical records despite the fact that he appears to be having major memory problems and possibly even delusions.
After declaring that reproductive rights are no longer an issue because he’d “sent it back to the states” which he insists was the desire of liberals and conservatives for 50 years (total nonsense) there was this straightforward question about whether Trump planned to have the FDA ban mifepristone. He answered with a bizarre mish-mash of words about “supplementing” with something “open and humane” and people voting on it that made no sense whatsoever.
Recall that he told Time Magazine he has “pretty strong views” about mifepristone and would be making an announcement “probably over the next week.” That was on April 30th. There’s been no announcement. This latest gibberish is all we have to go on.
And then there were the crowds. He simply could not stop talking about the size of his crowds, complaining that the press was undercounting them even declaring that his January 6th crowd was bigger than Martin Luther King’s March on Washington. Over and over again he kept bringing it up apropos of nothing as if on a loop. It is a long-standing obsession of his that seems to be getting worse.
He did make some news by saying that he had agreed to debate Harris on ABC from which he had earlier backed out. He also announced a debate on NBC and on Fox but he got the dates all mixed up and according to the Harris campaign they’ve only agreed to the original debate on ABC on September 10th anyway. Perhaps others will happen as well but despite Trump’s apparent desperation to have them, nothing has been set.
All in all, it was another Trump trainwreck, perhaps one of his worst but certainly not unprecedented. However, this time, the opposition is taking no prisoners. The Harris campaign put out a very sharp (and hilarious) response:
He was dour and angry and frankly is starting to look a whole lot older, just in the past few months. He’s not enjoying himself and it shows and compared to the excited crowds greeting Harris and Walz this week this sad, pathetic appearance seemed almost funereal. Donald Trump isn’t fun anymore.
I think he’s considering for the first time that he might lose again and he is not psychologically equipped to deal with that reality. Sure, he’ll fight it and tell his supporters that it was stolen and perhaps even incite more violence. But deep down he knows he might actually lose just as he knows deep down that he lost in 2020. There’s a look of panic in his eyes right now. If he fails this time he might just break apart at the seams.
Chris Hayes had a good take on it last night:
“We are in a different world, one where Donald Trump is no longer the clear favorite,” says Chris Hayes. “That is why we have seen him swing wildly from overconfident to spiraling, whining, and very obviously miserable.” pic.twitter.com/Q6kI7Xdxdi
— All In with Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) August 9, 2024
I don’t actually have a problem with showing Trump. People need to be reminded what a decrepit loon he is. I do have a problem with the stupid questions, his unwillingness /inability to answer questions and the media’s docile acceptance of all that. The failure to follow up his gibberish was egregious.
Moreover, the dogging of Harris for an interview or press conference, just as they dogged Clinton and Biden while holding up that Trump garbage as some kind of value to the citizens is outrageous. They are pretty much threatening her with bad press like the horrific press they gave Joe Biden for months:
Trump is holding a presser today, we interviewed him last week and Vance yesterday and Vance is taking open press questions. Time’s just about up on Harris to avoid this becoming a thing. https://t.co/eDwkyHoDW6
Your compromised freedoms are on the line in November
People who don’t believe in democracy don’t believe in America. Nor in its founding principles. Nor in its founding documents. No amount of red, white, and blue garb, no number of oversized flags, decaled monster trucks, and boat parades can conceal that fact. If January 6th was not stark proof enough, where have you been?
Vice President Kamala Harris is saying it without saying it.
The Democrats have finally reclaimed freedom, and they have finally found their joy, and, perhaps most importantly, they have finally reclaimed patriotism. pic.twitter.com/n9f1RB1omf
— The.Ink, from Anand Giridharadas (@AnandWrites) August 9, 2024
If Republicans expect to lead in the 21st century they might first try living in it.
Donald Trump’s view of the world stopped developing along with his emotional maturity before he was a teen.
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Republicans claimed Sir Ronald of Reagan had slain the Evil Empire and won the Cold War. Decades into the 21st century, they are still fighting it, invoking communists and Marxists and socialists (Oh, my!) as a slur against every political foe, always “to the left of [Fox News liberal bogeyman here].” President Harry Truman declared in 1952 that socialism is “a scare word they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years.” Scare tactics are still their go-to.
Over 70 years later, The Wall Street Journal this week inveighed against Minnesota under Gov. Tim Walz (D) for moving his state “sharply to the left.” Among Walz’s sins:
• Funding “the North Star Promise Program, which provides free college for students with a family income under $80,000,” including illegal immigrants.
• Creating a state system for paid family and medical leave, capped at a combined 20 weeks a year and funded by a 0.88% payroll tax.
• Mandating that public utilities generate 80% carbon-free electricity by 2030, ramping up to 100% by 2040. He’s a fervent believer in “climate action.”
• Subsidizing electric vehicles by “requiring EV charging infrastructure within or adjacent to new commercial and multi-family buildings,” as the Governor’s office bragged.
• Passing one of the nation’s most permissive abortion statutes that has essentially no limits and no age consideration for minors.
• Declaring Minnesota to be a “trans refuge,” with a law saying that the state will ignore a “court order for the removal of a child issued in another state because the child’s parent or guardian assisted the child in receiving gender-affirming care in this state.”
• Establishing automatic voter registration and letting Minnesotans sign up for a permanent absentee ballot option.
“Make America Minnesota Already,” Catherine Rampell recommends in The Washington Post:
Republicans have smeared Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz as an “extremist,” “communist” and “left-wing radical.” They warn of the “dangerously liberal” agenda that he’s implemented as governor of Minnesota and that he might soon inflict upon the entire country.
You know what? The country should be so lucky.
In general, Walz’s state agenda has been politically smart, fiscally sound and family-friendly — not to mention long overdue pretty much everywhere else in America.
What Republicans whine are costly expenses, Walz views as sound public investments … in people.
To the idea of universal free breakfasts and lunches for schoolchildren, Walz thinks like Charlton Heston’s Moses in the film. Republicans and the Wall Street Journal play the role of Egyptian slavemasters. “What? Feed the slaves?”
Moses: A city is built of brick, Pharoah. The strong make many, the starving make few. The dead make none.
“Making nutritious meals available to kids, without stigmatizing the poorest among them, is a valuable public investment,” Rampell writes. “A recent meta-analysis of past studies on universal school meals found positive associations with children’s diet quality, food security and academic performance.”
Rampell continues:
Other policies that [Walz] pushed also look like good stewardship of public funds — in addition to being, you know, compassionate.
For instance, Minnesota is developing a program to ensure that kids on Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program are continuously insured from birth to age 6, rather than periodically kicking them out of the program if their family’s income fluctuates slightly.
This is no small mercy. The paperwork required for reapplication is burdensome. It often results in eligible kids losing access to needed medical coverage because of administrative errors, even when their family’s income doesn’t change. Similar programs have been associated with improvements in kids’ health.
Minnesota’s version looks like a pretty good bargain for taxpayers, too. Research suggests that historical Medicaid expansions for kids offer high returns on investment. These policies often “pay for themselves,” says MIT economics professor Nathaniel Hendren, because of “improved later-life health of those children (which reduces future Medicaid spending) and increased later-life earnings (which increases tax revenue).”
Democrats get the idea. You get the idea. But not slavemasters. Not Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R), who she signed a law expanding child labor.
A recent survey conducted by Morning Consult found that 82 percent of registered voters support paid family and medical leave. Among the supporters: 76 percent of Republicans. I supposed that means three-quarters of Republican voters must be “communists” like Walz, too.
When you’ve lost 76% of Republicans, Republicans, you’ve lost. Welcome to the 21st century. It looks like Minnesota.
Says the man just found to be liable for half a billion dollars for committing massive business fraud:
Trump on the Federal Reserve:
"I feel the president should have at least say [on rates] in there … I think I have a better instinct than, in many cases, people that would be on the Federal Reserve or the chairman" pic.twitter.com/Ff7PTdn9A3
Fox's Cavuto: "You might have heard the former president refer to whats going on right now as a hurdle towards depression, well if that's the case the markets having a funny way of showing it … the S&P 500 putting in its best single day performance we've seen in a couple years" pic.twitter.com/kiQ0tFQ1G3
That “Kamala Crash” thing didn’t pan out for Trump. But that won’t stop him from telling his cult that it’s happening anyway. Fox News pointing out the reality is undoubtedly driving him crazy.
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