Most of us have them, family members who for reasons unfathomable have gone full red-hat. For other unknown reasons a lot of them run for office in Arizona.
Six members of Rep. Paul Gosar’s (Ariz.-R) family made a point of asking people not to vote for him. Several appeared in attack ads against him and after Jan. 6 called for his ouster from Congress:
“I consider him a traitor to this country. I consider him a traitor to his family,” Gosar’s brother, Dave, a Wyoming attorney, said. “He doesn’t see it. He’s disgraced and dishonored himself.”
Now it’s Wonder Woman actress Lynda Carter’s turn, reports Mother Jones. Her sister, Pamela, “an activist prayer warrior,” is running for a state house district in suburban Maricopa County. Lynda’s distancing herself:
In their quest to hold onto the legislature, Republicans have turned to a member of a famous Arizona family—Pamela Carter, older sister of the original Wonder Woman, Lynda Carter. On the campaign trail, the candidate Carter has talked up her work as a successful entrepreneur and a record of academic accomplishment, and boasts of having “my family’s full support” for her state house run. But a review of her record and past statements tells a much different story: In contrast to the fourth district’s moderate profile, Carter is a fervently anti-abortion minister who has been “blessed with end-time revelation” and who has made confusing claims about her past. And one notable member of her family is not on board—her famous sister, an advocate for reproductive rights.
“On her website, Pam claims to have her ‘family’s full support,’” Lynda Carter said in a statement to Mother Jones. “I have known Pam my entire life, which is why I sadly cannot endorse her for this or any public office.”
Pamela Carter’s resume is a mite muddy, the Mother Jones story explains in detail. She’s also from the Seven Mountains wing of evangelical Christianity when she’s not multi-level marketing and prophesying.
She talked frequently about building influence on the “Media mountain” and said in 2011 that she was part of “God’s media army…to be raised up for such a time as this, to take possession of the arts, the entertainment media, the internet.”
The term is often used by proponents of a Christian nationalist movement sometimes called the New Apostolic Reformation and a belief its adherents subscribe to known as Seven Mountains Dominionism, which aims to take gain influence over the seven spheres (or “mountains”) of government, education, media, family, entertainment, religion, and business.
Sister Lynda, like Gosar’s siblings, is having none of it.
In her statement opposing Pamela Carter’s candidacy, Lynda Carter praised the late Republican Sen. John McCain for his “decency, justice, and freedom,” while explicitly endorsing both of the Democrats running against her sister:
“As a native Arizonan, I am proud to endorse Kelli Butler and Karen Gresham to represent LD4 in Arizona’s State House. Kelli and Karen are both strong, experienced candidates, born and raised in Arizona,” she said. “They are working mothers fighting for the rights that matter most to Arizonans, especially every child’s right to a quality education.”
Who knows what truths the Lasso of Hestia would tease out of Pamela?
If you’re in the mood for a breathless summary of superconmisogynisticextrabragadocious Trumpy lowlights, Seth Meyers has you covered. Bookmark it for Thanksgiving.
This Zak Kimball guy has a set of explainers on his TikTok page, but this one answers The Donald’s debate challenge to Vice President Kamala Harris about why she hasn’t accomplished the things she proposes in 3-1/2 years in that office. For the civics-challenged.
Why hasn't Kamala Harris already done as VP what she's promising to do as president? Here's your answer motherfuckers. 🙌🙏👏👊🌊🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/GWHHXAfs62
Tom Bonier explains why the polls are so screwed up and why they now overestimate Repunblicans’ support.
Bonier: There’s this notion that polls underestimated Republicans, but in the end, what happened in 2022 is that polls overestimated Republican support. Since the Dobbs decision, we’ve seen a continued track record of Republicans underperforming—underperforming previous… pic.twitter.com/n766Qe4QAf
Following Taylor Swift's endorsement of Kamala Harris, there has been a "400% or 500% increase" in voter registration — between 9,000-10,000 people per hour, according to data firm TargetSmart.
Gray wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park in 1995, resulting in a trophic cascade through the entire ecosystem. After the wolves were driven extinct in the region nearly 100 years ago, scientists began to fully understand their role in the food web as a keystone species.
TRANSCRIPT: In 1995, something really exciting happened in the nation’s first national park, Yellowstone. 41 wild wolves are reintroduced here by scientists. After 100 years of being hunted, wolves could once again call this place home.
The wolves thrived, but something else very surprising happened. Their return had a spectacular effect on the landscape, an effect that spread wider than anyone thought possible. So how did this all happen?
In the past, wolves were seen as a risk to people and livestock, and they were exterminated from the Yellowstone area in the 1920s. The elk’s main predator was gone, and their population more than doubled. Elk are both grazers and browsers, so they eat grass, shrubs, and trees. They overgraze the entire park, upsetting the natural balance of the ecosystem.
Mammals like mice and rabbits could not use the plants to hide from predators, and their populations fell dramatically. Grizzly bears suffered as the elk munch away their berry supply, which they badly need to build up fat before hibernating. Pollinators like bees and hummingbirds had fewer flowers to feed on, songbirds less trees to nest in.
Perhaps the elk’s most devastating impact was how they affected the park’s riverbanks. When the wolf was around, elk were vulnerable when they moved down towards rivers to drink. They would never spend too long by the water, where they could be ambushed. But with the apex predators gone, they gorged themselves faster than the shrubs could grow and gathered in great herds on the lush river banks. The massive elk’s hooves eroded the riverbanks, so the rivers and streams clouded with soil.
The fish inherited murky homes, and without trees and clean water, beavers couldn’t build their dams to live in. Without the protection of the dams, fish, amphibians and otters suffered even more, and all because of the missing wolf.
Now, with as many as 100 gray wolves in Yellowstone National Park, their reintroduction is having an effect that even surprised scientists. Wolves have contributed to bringing elk numbers down from 17,000 in 1995 to just 4,000 today. Since only the healthiest of elk survived, the population is much more robust.
All of these elk kills mean more carcasses for scavengers like coyotes, eagles, and ravens. Grizzly bear numbers have increased, too. The grizzlies benefit from the wolves’ elk kills, and less elk also means more berries, and just the elk’s fear of wolves gives the riverbank trees, like aspen and willow, a chance to regenerate. They can grow to five times their original size in just six years.
The songbirds are returning, too, and the bigger trees along the rivers means greater root structures, which means stronger riverbanks and less erosion. Clean water and big trees, beaver paradise. The return of the beaver dams creates new habitats for fish, amphibians, reptiles, and even otters.
This shows just some of the trickle-down effects of the wolves’ reintroduction, known to scientists as a trophic cascade. The trophic cascade doesn’t stop there, though. The wolves are even helping us. In 2005, over 100,000 visitors went to Yellowstone National Park just to see the wolves, pumping $30 million into the local economy, money for jobs and livelihoods.
Factor in that wolves contribute to the health and diversity of all Yellowstone’s wildlife, and its impact is staggering. The wolf’s benefits also cascade down to the 106,000 residents of Billings, Montana. Their drinking water, Yellowstone River, is now cleaner. Who would’ve thought that just bringing back some wolves could produce such far-reaching benefits for nature and for people? From the tips of taller trees down to its cleaner rivers, these wild wolves have rebalanced and restored our nation’s very first national park.
Now that Vance is accompanying Trump on the top of the Republican ticket, this paradox has opened Republicans up to fresh criticisms. How populist can Vance really be while cozying up to billionaires in Silicon Valley? What does a Yale-educated attorney and ex-venture capitalist understand about the lives of Trump’s blue-collar voters? Is a guy who owns not one but two million-dollar houses a credible mouthpiece for the GOP’s fledgling economic populism?
But the deeper I’ve dug into the conservative world Vance comes from — often referred to as the “New Right” — the more I’ve come to see Vance’s split identity as a feature rather than a bug for his ideological supporters.
In fact, Vance embodies an archetype that has been theorized about at length in New Right-adjacent books and podcasts (many of which Vance has read and listened to). By forging an alliance between the elite “New Right” and the MAGA masses, Vance, according to this reading, could serve as the leader of a new movement to institute an illiberal and explicitly reactionary political order. Though adopting the rhetoric of conservatism populism, this new order would be a fundamentally elitist one: It would expel America’s current ruling elite in order to replace it with a new, more conservative one, drawn from the ranks of the New Right.
The details of this plan differ between the various writers and thinkers that have influenced Vance — people like the Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Deneen, the internet philosopher Curtis Yarvin and the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel. But taken together, their prescriptions amount to a kind of three-step plan for the New Right’s project: Identify a member of the New Right elite who can tap into the energies of an ascendant right-wing populist movement, ride those energies to political power, and then carry out a top-down transformation of American society along illiberal lines. It is, in effect, a plan to accomplish through elite rule what even the MAGA movement has failed to accomplish through democratic control: The creation of a social order built around conservative values, even if those values remain broadly unpopular with the American people.
[….]
“One of the ways in which I’m very much populist is that I think people need to have elected representatives [who] try to channel their frustrations into solutions that will make their lives better,” Vance told me when I interviewed him in his Senate office in December 2023. “One of the ways I’m very much not a populist is that I think every populist movement that has ever existed has failed unless it’s captured some subset of the people who are professionally in government.”
He added: “You can’t just run a political movement purely with voters — you need voters, you need bureaucrats, you need lawyers, you need business leaders, you need the whole thing.”
I don’t think you can call those “conservative values.” It’s a movement built on fascist ideology. But then these days that’s just a small semantic difference.
Vance is a very dangerous fellow as are the techbro elites that support him. They are the likely future of the Republican party and they have a whole lot of money to throw at their project.
Read the whole thing if you can. But pour yourself a good stiff drink first.
As ever, @jbouie is insightful: Springfield dogs & cats is not a meme; it is blood libel: incitement to racist violence. I've been thinking about his recent column: their insane rhetoric is meaningless on the surface, but deadly meaningful underneath. Media are missing this. pic.twitter.com/wKBAKGaZ7a
They are having to shut down elementary schools in Springfield today because of threats. Haitian immigrants are keeping their kids at home and fear going to the store. It’s only a matter of tie before something terrible happens.
Trump said today at his press conference that he specifically plans to deport all the immigrants in Springfield. Of course, they are here legally but that doesn’t matter. Neither does it matter that he said he would deport them all to Venezuela. They are, of course, Haitian but to him all the “shitholoe countries” are the same.
His demagoguery is getting worse and worse. And his partner in crime JD Vance doubled down today:
Those immigrants were invited to fill the jobs that the locals couldn’t fill. The town was dying. losing population by the thousands. They are considered by the local businesses to be their best workers:
Factory owner in Springfield, Ohio says he has 30 Haitian workers and wishes he had 30 more.
He says that unlike Americans in the area, they show up to work on time, stay by their machines, and don’t have a drug problem. pic.twitter.com/GYO9pwrNij
What we are seeing is true fascist demagoguery. And it’s being promulgated as much by the new generation leader JD Vance as it is the elderly psychopath Donald Trump. This is the GOP.
The man at the beginning is close Trump confidante Johnny McEntee, a really sick piece of work, demanding that someone produce for him an example of women bleeding out in parking lots because doctors can’t offer necessary medical care for women who are having miscarriages or other medical emergencies. As you can see from that woman’s horrific story, it happens all the time. And there are plenty more like her.
I was glad to see that after decades of Democrats hemming and hawing and grasping at euphemisms to defend reproductive freedom Kamala Harris finally did it right at the debate:
Well, as I said, you’re going to hear a bunch of lies. And that’s not actually a surprising fact. Let’s understand how we got here. Donald Trump hand-selected three members of the United States Supreme Court with the intention that they would undo the protections of Roe v. Wade. And they did exactly as he intended.
And now in over 20 states there are Trump abortion bans which make it criminal for a doctor or nurse to provide health care. In one state it provides prison for life. Trump abortion bans that make no exception even for rape and incest.
Which understand what that means. A survivor of a crime, a violation to their body, does not have the right to make a decision about what happens to their body next. That is immoral. And one does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree the government, and Donald Trump certainly, should not be telling a woman what to do with her body.
I have talked with women around our country. You want to talk about this is what people wanted? Pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term suffering from a miscarriage, being denied care in an emergency room because the health care providers are afraid they might go to jail and she’s bleeding out in a car in the parking lot? She didn’t want that. Her husband didn’t want that.
A 12 or 13-year-old survivor of incest being forced to carry a pregnancy to term? They don’t want that. And I pledge to you when Congress passes a bill to put back in place the protections of Roe v. Wade as president of the United States, I will proudly sign it into law.
But understand, if Donald Trump were to be re-elected, he will sign a national abortion ban. Understand in his Project 2025 there would be a national abortion ban.
Understand in his Project 2025 there would be a national abortion — a monitor that would be monitoring your pregnancies, your miscarriages. I think the American people believe that certain freedoms, in particular the freedom to make decisions about one’s own body, should not be made by the government.
They asked Trump if he would sign an abortion ban and he sputtered, didn’t answer and brought up student loans for some reason. Then the moderator asked Harris if she would support any restrictions on abortion:
I absolutely support reinstating the protections of Roe v. Wade. And as you rightly mentioned, nowhere in America is a woman carrying a pregnancy to term and asking for an abortion. That is not happening. It’s insulting to the women of America.
And understand what has been happening under Donald Trump’s abortion bans. Couples who pray and dream of having a family are being denied IVF treatments.
What is happening in our country, working people, working women who are working one or two jobs, who can barely afford childcare as it is, have to travel to another state to get on a plane sitting next to strangers, to go and get the health care she needs. Barely can afford to do it.
And what you are putting her through is unconscionable.
And the people of America have not — the majority of Americans believe in a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body. And that is why in every state where this issue has been on the ballot, in red and blue states both, the people of America have voted for freedom.
Bravo.
NEW AD: VP holds Trump accountable for overturning Roe during the debate.
This is where it went bad for Donald. In our dialers, undecided voters said it was his worst answer.
The ad comes before Trump's visit to AZ and NV, both states with abortion referendums in November. pic.twitter.com/Ik0YFAvcI7
As a traveler, I'm both a proud American and a citizen of the world — and I've got a few thoughts on this coming election.
This election is deeper than partisanship. It's far more than Republican versus Democrat. In the future, big challenges like pandemics, refugees, and… pic.twitter.com/ebLJosmAJY
This one’s for the PBS watching older Indies and Republicans:
As a traveler, I’m both a proud American and a citizen of the world — and I’ve got a few thoughts on this coming election. This election is deeper than partisanship. It’s far more than Republican versus Democrat.
In the future, big challenges like pandemics, refugees, and climate change will be blind to borders. They’ll be everyone’s problem and only solved by working together as a family of nations.
The world needs not American isolation, but American leadership. Not the chaos of Trump, but the stability of @KamalaHarris
. Of course, how you vote is your choice. But if you believe, as I do, in the importance of nations working together constructively, the stakes are really high…and the best candidate is clear. Register to vote today at http://vote.gov — and encourage your travelin’ friends to do the same!
I also like his argument very much. If you are a person who has spent any time outside the US you know this is true. This world is a lot smaller than people think and we are facing some huge challenges as a country and as a planet. We need competent people running this very powerful country. Trump has already shown that he is not it.
Despite the ongoing excessive whining in the press about Vice President Kamala Harris not doing interviews and MAGA’s laughable insistence that Trump won the debate (and also that it was rigged), the truth is that Harris is running an exceptional campaign. At every important juncture, she has met the moment and surpassed it.
Personally, I never understood the widely (but not deeply) held belief that she was a mediocre politician. As a Californian I have followed her career pretty closely from the time she made a name for herself as the San Francisco district attorney and then Attorney General. I happily voted for her for the Senate. She always struck me as a talented politician who was very likely headed for higher office if the breaks came her way.
She took a shot for president in 2019 and had a bad primary run, but she’s hardly the first presidential aspirant to flame out in their first run. Joe Biden ran twice before he finally got the nomination. Even the sainted John McCain and Ronald Reagan failed in their first attempts. But even though she ended up being chosen for VP it seemed as though her failure was seen as possibly fatal and that dark cloud followed her through her first couple of years in the job.
Needless to say, a lot of this was fed by the right wing which went to great lengths to demean and demonize her, which is something they do to all Democratic women, particularly the Black ones. As VP they knew she would run when Biden’s term was over and their crusade to degrade her also seeped into the beltway ether.
The last two years were quite a bit better as she was featured more in roles that got a lot of attention and it was clear that she was an effective communicator and advocate, most especially on abortion rights about which the president was notoriously uncomfortable. But even with that, when it became obvious that Joe Biden’s re-election campaign was in trouble there were many Democrats and members of the media who were convinced that she was not up to the job. That frenzy to create a “mini-primary” or some kind of rube goldberg mechanism to pick a candidate was largely based on that knee jerk opinion.
Luckily, Joe Biden knew better and he immediately endorsed her as many of us desperately hoped he would do. And the Democratic establishment relatively quickly fell in line, thank goodness. .
The campaign rollout was simply exceptional, one of the best I’ve ever seen. Harris personally worked to phones to get the party lined up behind her, they figured out a process to secure the nomination without any hiccups and with almost no time to prepare, they smoothly transitioned the Biden campaign apparatus (which was obviously very good itself) into the Harris campaign and they immediately went to work.
Those first few days with her appearance at campaign headquarters taking a call from Joe Biden on camera was perfectly choreographed. The VP search and final choice of Gov. Tim Walz was pitch perfect and their first rally appearances together were raucous, exciting events that radiated optimism and confidence, something we haven’t seen for quite some time in this country. I don’t know where the “joy” meme originated but it felt real and was a breath of fresh air.
And then there was the convention which was hastily retooled from a Joe Biden re-election celebration to a “change” candidate introduction. It was a love fest, with ecstatic receptions for every faction of the sprawling coalition Harris was bringing together. And when the nominee herself took the stage on the final night she looked and sounded like a president which is no mean feat for a woman in American politics.
Since then she has gracefully and graciously accepted the endorsement from some of the most conservative Republicans in the country including none other than former Vice President Dick Cheney. So far she’s doing something that is very difficult to pull of but if she does it will be legendary — she’s trying to excite the base and also expand the coalition all the way from Bernie Sanders to Dick Cheney. (Trump, on the other hand, seems determined to shrink his coalition to the most extreme MAGA fanatics. )
Harris didn’t do it all herself, of course. As NY Magazine’s Rebecca Traister chronicles in this fascinating feature about Harris and her campaign, grassroots organizations, many of them having evolved and matured over the past few years from the women-focused Resistance groups that formed in reaction to Trump’s upset victory in 2016, lurched into gear immediately to help jump start fundraising and organizing on the ground. It started with Black Women for Kamala which has inspired dozens of others. Just this week there was “Paisans for Kamala” featuring Nancy Pelosi and Robert deNiro.
The campaign itself has a kick-ass social media team that’s churning out memes, tik-toks, tweets and Instagram stories that are clever, pointed and tuned in. The outreach to younger voters using these platforms is revolutionary in a presidential campaign. The campaign is wisely allowing them to run unfettered and if the youngs come home to the Democrats and vote in large numbers, this team will deserve a lot of the credit.
And what about this fundraising? The unprecedented massive warchest that’s been assembled by the campaign in such a sort time is simply mind-boggling. The campaign raised more than $310 million in July, driven by a record-breaking $200 million in the first week. In August they raised another $361 million, tripling Trump’s haul. They took in another $47 million in the 24 hours after the debate this week. Most of it has come from small donors which reflects the enthusiasm that’s palpable at the Harris and Walz events.
She absolutely dominated Trump in the debate this week and the campaign (which always stays on offense) immediately challenged him to another one. Trump is refusing, lamely insisting that he won to which Harris adviser David Plouffe tweeted that we’d finally discovered Trump’s spirit animal: the chicken.
They’re not resting on their laurels. They’re hitting the ground running:
New: VP Harris will begin a more aggressive phase of campaigning today in NC as she tries to capitalize on debate, her team says. Big rallies. More interviews, w battleground press in coming days & NABJ next wk. Ads w debate footage. Walz & surrogates traveling widely this wknd.
According to Traister, some of the Democratic “professionals” have descended (Plouffe being one of them) and she worries that they will quash the creativity and spontaneity that’s characterized the campaign so far. I’m actually fairly confident that it won’t happen largely because the candidate herself has already demonstrated that she’s not going to blindly follow their advice. Early on when a pollster suggested that they not use the phrase “we’re not going back” or the term “weird,” Harris said no. I have a sneaking suspicion that’s not the last time she decided to trust her own instincts instead of the stale beltway risk averse habits that take all the life out of a campaign.
It’s a big team with many moving parts, obviously. If things are going well because they are all moving in the same direction without a lot of internal strife, you have to look at the person at the top. Harris was slammed pretty hard for her primary campaign’s dysfunction but it appears that she learns from her mistakes. This one is working as well as any we’ve seen and under very unusual circumstances.
The Bulwark’s Sarah Longwell held one of her famous focus groups on the morning after the debate. When asked how they would describe Harris’s performance, the most common response was “presidential.” Kamala Harris knows what she’s doing and it shows.
She looks like a president and that is a miracle since we’ve never had a woman president much less a Black woman president. But she does.
She won.
Longwell focus group: Alpha Harris: four people used the word presidential
Traister article
Let’s see if chicken man excises Hannibal Lecter out of his speech tonight. If he does, demonstrates he was humiliated on that point on Tuesday night. If he doesn’t, well, that would be awesome. Classic win, win.
The New York Times(?) provides readers needed comic relief:
On Tuesday night, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris spent 90 minutes trading blows in a fierce debate. Out of duty to a weary electorate eager for change, we enlisted the musical talents of the Gregory Brothers and a special guest, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, to provide the debate recap you didn’t know you needed.
Take it in, friends. We’ve got a long way yet to go and more work to do.
Just yesterday, I argued that “so much of what Donald Trump does and says is not strategy so much as pathology. And feral instinct. His fanboys handle strategy.” That’s still true this morning. Among the reasons the press and some of the left’s own have trouble coming to grips with his lunacy is, as children of the Enlightenment, we put so much stock in reason. Unreason does not compute.* We all want to make a steak out of hash.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is perhaps the quickest and sharpest Democrats have to carry its message. Yet, here he is attempting to paint Donald Trump’s unhinged cats-and-dogs rant during this week’s debate as a distraction strategy. It may be instinct. Distraction may be someone else’s strategy. But it’s not Trump’s. He doesn’t think with his atrophied frontal lobes.
Buttigieg: This is a strategy to get us talking about the latest crazy thing that he did, whatever urban legend he amplifies right now, it's about people eating cats or geese or whatever because he cannot afford for us to be talking about his record. pic.twitter.com/MLY3PLck0o
Piers Morgan’s guests did the same this week, offering what Trump needs to do differently and how he needs to reconfigure his campaign. He needs to fire his advisors and get new ones who will help him present himself as more presidential in coming days.
Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R) of Texas argued that the debate was easy for Trump to win, offering Republican counterfactuals that Trump should have (but didn’t) use to his advantage. Convincing independent’s “is very easy to do,” Crenshaw declared in Trumpian fashion. Trump just missed opportunities. Crenshaw might as easily have spun straw into gold as spin madness into rationality.
Podcaster Brian Taylor Cohen was having none of it.
'I've sat here listening to everyone say that Trump has to fire his advisors who steered him wrong on the debate stage. Does anybody ACTUALLY think that Trump took the advice of his advisors? He's so easy to bait, you could dangle a cookie in front of a 4-year-old and they would… pic.twitter.com/UUrx2XYXfT
“I’ve sat here listening to everyone say that Trump has to fire his advisors who steered him wrong on the debate stage. Does anybody ACTUALLY think that Trump took the advice of his advisors? He’s so easy to bait, you could dangle a cookie in front of a 4-year-old and they would have more discipline than Trump. This notion that his ADVISORS are responsible for what happened on that debate stage is a joke.”
Trump has never been more than what he is: a seven year-old in a 70-something body. If the press presented him as he is, if they reported what he said unfiltered, it would make their reporting and their reporters appear incoherent. It’s their job to make sense of the news. What do they do when there’s no sense to be made? You’re watching it live.
* When the New Age movement was in its heyday here, it was head-scratching to watch believers throw around terms like quantum and energies and frequencies to dress up magical thinking and medieval alchemy as cutting-edge science for the late 20th century.
