If you have time to read any long form piece this weekend, read this one from Pro Publica about the militia movement. They have been following one large national militia group that has avoided scrutiny up until now called APIII (American Patriots Three Percent) for several years and it’s enough to make the hair on your neck stand up. Perhaps the biggest threat comes from the fact that they have indoctrinated many members of law enforcement:
AP3 has expanded at a dramatic pace since Jan. 6, while keeping much of its activity out of view. This rise is documented in more than 100,000 internal messages obtained by ProPublica, spanning the run-up to Jan. 6 through early 2024. Along with extensive interviews with 22 current and former members of AP3, the records provide a uniquely detailed inside view of the militia movement at a crucial moment.
The messages reveal how AP3 leaders have forged alliances with law enforcement around the country and show the ways in which, despite an initial crackdown by social media, they have attracted a new wave of recruits. A change in the political climate has also helped: In a matter of months after Jan. 6, rioters went from pariahs to heroes in the rhetoric of prominent Republican politicians. By the summer of 2021, people were enlisting in AP3, saying that Jan. 6 inspired them to join.
A portrait emerges of a group alternating between focused action and self-destructive chaos and facing a schism over whether political engagement can still address our nation’s problems — or whether violence is the only option. It can be hard to discern the line between bluster and imminent threat in the messages, a perennial struggle for FBI agents who monitor paramilitary groups. But some senior AP3 members grew so alarmed that they quit, scared by the number of people, even high-level leaders, advocating acts of terror.
As I said, read the whole thing if you have the time. I wonder if the Trump cult will rise up en masse if he loses again. But these guys are another matter entirely. They worship Tim McVeigh. ‘Nuf said.
He added later that he “ran for president one time and won!”
I’m not sure why anyone ever thought Trump’s puerile nicknames were so clever to begin with but to the extent he has a real “nickname” talent, he’s certainly lost it now:
The former president, who rarely mentioned Harris until after President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance, tried out “Laffin’ Kamala” before pivoting to “Lyin’ Kamala,” then jettisoned that for “Crazy Kamala,” which he interspersed with misspellings of her name.
In the last few days, he has abandoned those monikers — even as he continues to use nicknames for other adversaries.
Demeaning nicknames have been core to Trump’s political brand since he first jumped into the political scene, a tool he has leveraged against both Republicans and Democrats to humiliate his opponents and rile up his supporters. But he’s struggled to adjust to run against Harris, even as he has leaned into personal attacks.
He’s been repurposing his insults from the very beginning. He re-used “crooked”, “lyin'” “li’l” and “crazy” several times and added some truly bizarre ones like “Coco” and “Peekaboo” which only left people scratching their heads. He apparently doesn’t know what a thesaurus is so he’s just stuck with a handful of words that he can’t seem to fit with “Kamala.”
This shouldn’t be surprising. He has the vocabulary of a 4th grader. I’m not kidding:
President Donald Trump—who boasted over the weekend that his success in life was a result of “being, like, really smart”—communicates at the lowest grade level of the last 15 presidents, according to a new analysis of the speech patterns of presidents going back to Herbert Hoover.
The analysis assessed the first 30,000 words each president spoke in office, and ranked them on the Flesch-Kincaid grade level scale and more than two dozen other common tests analyzing English-language difficulty levels. Trump clocked in around mid-fourth grade, the worst since Harry Truman, who spoke at nearly a sixth-grade level.
At the top of the list were Hoover and Jimmy Carter, who were basically at an 11th-grade level, and President Barack Obama, in third place with a high ninth-grade level of communicating with the American people.
The Flesch-Kincaid scale was developed in 1975 for the U.S. Navy to assess the relative difficulty of training manuals. A database of Trump’s words, compiled by the incomparable factba.se, ran the comparative analysis yesterday, in response to the president’s claim that he is “a genius.”
Factba.se has collected interviews, speeches and press conferences from previous presidents, using material publicly available from presidential libraries, and including the University of California, Santa Barbara’s American Presidency Project, which contains presidential press conferences going back to Hoover in 1929.
The website excluded communiques issued by the last two presidents on social media and limited the study to unscripted words uttered at press conferences and other public appearances.
The words were run through a variety of lexicological analyses, besides the Flesch-Kincaid, and the results were the same. In every one, Trump came in dead last. Trump also uses the fewest “unique words” (2,605) of any president—Obama was the best at 4,869—and uses words with the fewest average syllables, with 1.33 per word, compared to positively multi-syllabic president Hoover at 1.57.
“By every metric and methodology tested, Donald Trump’s vocabulary and grammatical structure is significantly more simple, and less diverse, than any President since Herbert Hoover, when measuring “off-script” words, that is, words far less likely to have been written in advance for the speaker,” Factba.se CEO Bill Frischling wrote. “The gap between Trump and the next closest president … is larger than any other gap using Flesch-Kincaid. Statistically speaking, there is a significant gap.”
Remember:
Trump’s National Economic Council chief Gary Cohn allegedly wrote in an email that the White House was in chaos. “It’s worse than you can imagine. An idiot surrounded by clowns,” Cohn wrote. “Trump won’t read anything—not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored. And his staff is no better.”
Vice President Kamala Harris has stormed into contention in the fast-growing and diverse states of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina, not long after Donald J. Trump had seemed on the verge of runningaway with those states when President Biden was still the Democratic nominee.
Ms. Harris is now leading Mr. Trump among likely voters in Arizona, 50 percent to 45 percent, and has even edged ahead of Mr. Trump in North Carolina — a state Mr. Trump won four years ago — while narrowing his lead significantly in Georgia and Nevada.
[…]
That marks a significant improvement for Democrats compared with May, when Mr. Trump led Mr. Biden 50 percent to 41 percent across Arizona, Georgia and Nevada in the previous set of Times/Siena Sun Belt polls, which did not include North Carolina. The new polls provide more evidence that Ms. Harris is successfully consolidating parts of the Democratic base that had been waffling over supporting Mr. Biden for months, particularly younger, nonwhite and female voters.
Last week, Times/Siena polling showed that Ms. Harris had pulled ahead of Mr. Trump by a narrow margin in the three northern battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Those states are generally considered the linchpin of any Democratic path to the White House. The Sun Belt represents an essential set of states for Mr. Trump while offering a potential second route for Ms. Harris to the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win.
In the new surveys, Mr. Trump is ahead in Georgia 50 percent to 46 percent, and, in Nevada, he has 48 percent compared to 47 percent for Ms. Harris. She has 49 percent of likely voters to Mr. Trump’s 47 percent in North Carolina, the only one of the seven core battleground states that he carried in 2020.
Trump is very weird too and he gets weirder by the day. It’s taking its toll.
The Times poll has been the toughest poll on the Democrats of the cycle so unless they’ve drastically changed their model this trend is positive. We’ll see if it continues but putting those other swing states back in play is good news,
Now that both parties have agreed to jettison the presidential debate commission that handled them in the past, this is what we’re dealing with:
On Thursday, it seemed like the dust had finally settled. “The debate about debates is over,” said Michael Tyler, the Harris campaign communications director, in a statement. “Donald Trump’s campaign accepted our proposal for three debates—two presidential and a vice presidential debate.”
“Assuming Donald Trump actually shows up on September 10 to debate Vice President Harris, then Governor Walz will see JD Vance on October 1 and the American people will have another opportunity to see the vice president and Donald Trump on the debate stage in October,” the Harris campaign continued.
But now, Trump’s team claims that the Democrat lied when she said the two sides reached a debate agreement. At the moment, there is only one confirmed debate between the presidential nominees, to be held September 10 by ABC News.
Nevertheless, the Trump campaign’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt told the Daily Caller Friday that Trump will be doing three debates and Vance will be doing two.
“Let’s be clear: President Trump will be on the debate stage THREE times with Fox News, ABC, and NBC/Telemundo. Likewise, Senator Vance will show up to debate Tim Walz on TWO occasions, on September 18 with CNN and October 1 with CBS. If Harris and Walz don’t show up, an empty podium can stand in their place, proving to the American people just how weak they are,” Leavitt told the Caller.
Trump had waffled for months on whether he would debate Harris, finally announcing he wanted to debate her three times on ABC, CBS, and Fox News. Harris accepted the invitations for the ABC and CBS debates but not for the one hosted by the Trump-adoring Fox.
There is no reason for Harris to agree to debate Trump on Fox, especially since CNN already did one like it earlier.
Trump is the one who wants debates because he’s convinced himself that he can dominate the weak little Black lady and win the election with a knock-out punch. He’s also losing and he knows it.
Meanwhile, the weirdo pulls this:
Vance, confusingly, proposed two vice presidential debates as opposed to the traditional one. One of his proposed dates is the same day Trump is due to be sentenced for his hush-money trial.
Nice try… I feel very confident that Tim Walz will not be attending that one. Lol.
Rebecca Traister, writer-at-large for New York magazine, is a treasure. Appearing last night on “The Daily Show,” Traister embraced the uncertainty and exhilaration of electing a woman president. That feeling is appropriately driving people to action. Shared anger at the demise of Roe is bringing people together. And it’s a joyful fight.
The right-wing manosphere’s inability to hide their loathing for women and scorn for woman is stunning, Traister offers. The RNC convention was an ickier, grosser pageant of misogyny.
As stunning is Democratic men’s embrace of women’s issues, she continued, “in a way I have rarely seen Democratic men be comfortable before.” They’ve made women’s reproductive freedom and “full civic participation a clarion, moral call of the Democratic Party.” Traister calls it a remarkable phenomenon on the left.
"What is fascinating to me is [Republicans'] inability to hide their loathing of women." New York Magazine writer RebeccaTraister (@rtraister) talks about the right's apparent disdain for women in this election. pic.twitter.com/SNy0y6tDRi
It’s like watching Rocky’s rematch with Clubber Lang. Clubber is suffering a flurry of jabs from the fitter, faster, more-skilled Rocky. He’s throwing punches and missing, breathing hard, wearing himself out. In his American flag trunks, Rocky taunts him, “My mother hits harder than that!”
HAHAHA! The Harris Walz campaign just put out THIS statement in preparation for Trump’s press conference today and it is scathing! This is how it’s done. Share this everywhere! pic.twitter.com/KBpAZyNxZY
Announcer: “I don’t think Lang knew what hit him yet in this whole first round.”
It’s a joy to watch, says Michael Tomasky in The New Republic, now that Donald Trump is the target and VP Kamala Harris is throwing punches. It’s still the first round, but Trump is tossing around “bananas” accusations and visibly flailing:
But wait. These are just the appetizers! Then he called Harris a “communist” and said the country under her leadership would devolve into a commie dystopia in which “everyone gets health care” (the horror!). And then, the piece de resistance: At the Jewish event, he praised Miriam Adelson, the huge Trump donor and widow of Sheldon Adelson, mentioning that he’d given her a Presidential Medal of Freedom, which he noted was the civilian equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor (given to military veterans) but was “actually much better” because people who receive the latter medal are “either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets, or they’re dead.”
You know how they say in sports that an opponent has gotten inside the other team’s head? Well, Harris and Tim Walz have certainly gotten inside Trump’s head. Walz’s “weird” comment, which Trump has also responded to in a, well, sort of weird way, was just the start. Harris has also smartly refused to take the GOP campaign’s bait, like when Trump attacked her race and J.D. Vance tried to make her childlessness an issue. Meanwhile, the Harris-Walz campaign trolls Trump in its press releases with snarky language I don’t recall Joe Biden’s or Hillary Clinton’s campaigns using. It sends the message, which must drive him nuts, that they don’t fear him at all.
Meanwhile, what else is Harris doing? Starting to unveil an economic package that, so far anyway, looks pretty great. It’s aimed straight at middle-class voters and focused on housing and grocery prices. You can’t get more kitchen table than that. And the bit about going after corporate price gougers is great. It sends a nice populist signal that she’s willing to make some enemies.
HA! The Harris Walz campaign just released this amazing statement in response to Trump’s unhinged press conference today. This is how it’s done! Share this everywhere! pic.twitter.com/qzJtQtmcHI
Trump is “a hot mess.” He’s facing someone the right hasn’t been trained to hate for 25 years. To his chagrin (horror?), Americans like her. And Gov. Tim Walz from “Minnesota nice” country.
Tomasky concludes, “He can’t understand this, and he simply can’t stand it. Trump’s like a predatory animal in a literal sense. Since he has no conscience, he’s all instinct, and his instinct is to find his prey’s weakness and go after it over and over.” He hasn’t found hers.
More to the point, Trump and his MAGA followers were blindsided by the hand-off to Harris because they cannot fathom Joe Biden (or anyone) giving up power for the good of the country and his party. In the might-make-right MAGA universe, that does not compute.
There are few certainties in life, but alongside death, taxes, and the arrival of hot weather in July, at least one other thing is inarguable: baby penguins are almost impossibly cute.
Guests visiting the Tennessee Aquarium during the Fourth of July holiday can join Aquarium staffers in excitedly welcoming the newest addition to the Penguins’ Rock gallery — a fluffy (and shockingly fast-growing) Macaroni Penguin chick.
The chick hatched on June 2 from an egg laid in late April by parents Bacon and Merlin. This baby bird is the first offspring ever produced by Bacon, who hatched in 2015 to two other Aquarium penguins, Hercules and Little Debbie. Though Little Debbie now lives at another facility, the newest chick’s grandsire, Hercules, still calls Penguins’ Rock home. With this latest arrival, the Aquarium is home for the first time ever to three generations of Macaroni Penguins.
The new chick is the Aquarium’s first hatchling since the 2021 arrival of Carla, a Gentoo Penguin. This latest baby is the first Macaroni Penguin chick since Pedro hatched in 2019. The Aquarium’s colony now has 23 birds: 9 Macaronis and 14 Gentoos.
The Aquarium’s keen-eyed penguin care team first noticed the egg pipping — that’s the cracking that occurs when a baby bird begins to chip away at its shell from the inside — on a Friday afternoon when they spotted a dime-sized hole with a tiny beak moving around inside. The new chick seemed to get cold feet on Saturday with little progress. However, by Sunday morning, the chick had fully emerged with an unusual level of precision that surprised even its veteran caregivers.
“It seems like it has a little type A personality,” says Assistant Curator of Forests Loribeth Lee. “It cracked the egg perfectly, straight down the middle. We’ve never really seen that.”
When Lee discovered the emerged hatchling, it was sitting in the center of its stacked shell, which was broken neatly around the side in an almost perfect circle.
The chick’s precocious attitude didn’t end there. So far, it has displayed confidence and fearlessness both in its nest and around caregivers when briefly removed for tri-weekly weigh-ins to monitor its health and rate of growth.
“We’ve seen it pick up rocks multiple times in the nest, which is very impressive that it can do that at its size,” Lee says. “It’s been throwing them around, so it’s a strong, tough little bird.”
Speaking of size, the chick has been growing at an astronomical rate, thanks largely to its parents’ diligence. A day after hatching, it weighed just 145 grams (5.1 ounces, or a little less than an iPhone 15). Three weeks later, it had ballooned to a whopping 1,592 grams (3.5 pounds). To put that in perspective, that’s the same as a 7-pound human infant weighing 77 pounds before it was a month old.
Lee credits those gains to the skillful parentage of Bacon and Merlin, who has fathered several previous chicks and kept the chick well fed. A penguin growing quickly isn’t all that unusual, though. Macaroni Penguin chicks must mature quickly to be ready for the harsh winters in their native Antarctic climates, where they reach adult size in just two and a half months.
“Why is Kamala the expert on tacos?” askedFox & Friends co-host Will Cain. “Did she say white guy tacos are tuna in mayonnaise?”
Conservative provocateur Mike Cernovich took it further, accusing Walz of lying about skipping seasoning. “Tim Walz is such a compulsive liar, and deployment dodger, that I decided to see if he lied about not seasoning his food.”
Cernovich pointed to a 2016 award-winning recipe by the Minnesota governor for “Turkey Taco Tot Hotdish,” which included the spices paprika, chili powder, onion powder, and garlic powder. “Tim Walz is such a compulsive liar, and deployment dodger, that I decided to see if he lied about not seasoning his food.”
Apparently, Cernovich, who is s moron in most ways, thinks that a “tot hot dish” is spicy. Here is an example of a taco tot hot dish:
Add taco seasoning and water and simmer according to package directions.
In a 13×9 casserole dish spread taco meat on bottom of pan.
Layer the corn on top of it.
Then place tater tots in a single layer on top of corn.
Spread the salsa and cheese on top of everything.
Cook in preheated oven for about one hour.
That’s “white guy” mexican food. So, by the way, is most of what they serve at Taco Bell if you don’t add the hot salsa.
Even Senator Ted Cruz got in on the drama, writing, “hispanics are not tacos.” Unclear what he meant there.
It seems like Republicans will find anything to get mad about if it comes from Harris and Walz—maybe they’ll eventually launch an investigation on what actually goes into “white guy tacos.”
Calling James Comer.(I’ll bet he’s had a few tot hot dishes in his day…)
It’s been evident for a while that Democrats have been injected with huge amounts of enthusiasm since Harris replaced President Joe Biden on the ticket. Call it “vibes” or something else; it’s real. Polls this week reflect that.
While a Monmouth University poll from June showed just 46 percent of Democrats said they were enthusiastic about a Trump-Biden rematch, that number has nearly doubled to 85 percent for the Trump-Harris race. Democrats’ enthusiasm leapfrogged Republicans, whose excitement stayed steady at 71 percent.
In other words, Democrats went from a 25-point enthusiasm deficit to a 14-point advantage, at least on this specific question. (Other polls have tested enthusiasm to vote, which is a somewhat different question, and the two parties have been closer.)
Also notable from the Monmouth poll: Nearly 9 in 10 Democrats say they’re optimistic about the election, compared with about three-quarters of Republicans.And an AP-NORC poll this week showed that 63 percent of Democrats are excited about a potential Harris administration, compared with 57 percent of Republicans for another Trump administration.
Democrats could be getting a Senate bump, too
A big question has been how much Harris’s momentum might filter down to other Democrats this election year — particularly with both the House and Senate very much in play. It wasn’t guaranteed it would help, especially given that Senate Democrats were already overperforming Biden.
Well, we got a big new set of Senate polls from the Cook Political Report on Thursday, and they suggest the Democrats got a significant bump there, too. Democrats improved their margins by an average of four points across five key Senate races: Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. They now lead in each race by at least seven points.
Democrats also flipped the generic ballot — where people are asked to choose between a generic Republican and a generic Democrat — in two other states that don’t feature a 2024 Senate race: Georgia and North Carolina. In total, Democrats actually gained more down ballot than they did in the presidential race in every state except Wisconsin.
We don’t have a ton of other new polls, but the ones we have do suggest some of these races have moved slightly in Democrats’ direction in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. […]
The ‘double-haters’ break for Harris
My colleague Philip Bump on Wednesday broke down the evolving picture with “double-haters,” or those who dislike both major-party candidates.
The top finding from the Monmouth poll is that they are a shrinking group, declining by about half since Harris’s entry into the race. While about 1 in 5 voters were double-haters before — a historically high number — it’s now about 1 in 10.
Perhaps more important is the big reason for that decline: A lot of them like Harris. And they’re now ready to vote for her.Among voters who still dislike both Trump and Biden, 53 percent say they’re voting for Harris, while just 11 percent say they’re voting for Trump.Previously, those double-haters had been more evenly split between Trump and Biden. Harris winning them over is a big boost for her.
He also observes that JD Vance is very unpopular (maybe because he’s so damned weird) and that other states may be coming into play, notably North Carolina and Florida. Who knows?
I highly recommend this piece by John Marshall on the state of polling in 2024. It’s hard to know what to think about them but Marshall’s analysis is excellent and rings true to me.
Trump is apparently afraid of campaigning so now he’s just calling “press conferences” and rambling for an hour or so and then taking a handful of questions which he doesn’t really answer.
CNN's Daniel Dale with a brutal fact check of Trump, " I made a whole list here of other claims that were just flat out wrong, like this was just a whole bunch of nonsense." pic.twitter.com/i0pkTHA0ps
Trump: The wind is ruining everything, killing all your birds, destroying the fields, all these gorgeous fields, you got windmills all over the place and you have birds. You want to see a bird cemetery, just go under a windmill. The bald eagle. These windmills knock them out like… pic.twitter.com/Qk1b4gvvHZ
Trump: You're all going to be thrown into a communist system. You will be thrown into a system where everybody gets health care. pic.twitter.com/nfimx3aAgs
Trump on if he's comfortable with companies threatening workers who go on strike: "I want companies to get workers that are gonna love them and work for a wage that lets the company make a profit." pic.twitter.com/Pa3ABU5hzW
"I'm very angry at her … I think I'm entitled to personal attacks. I don't have a lot of respect for her. I don't have a lot of respect for her intelligence … she actually called me weird" — Trump on Kamala Harris pic.twitter.com/zT2drtblgU
Trump: Virtually 100% of the net job creation in the last year has gone to migrants In fact I've heard substantially more and actually beyond that number 100%. It’s a much higher number than that but the government has not caught up with that yet. pic.twitter.com/OhXChdai8n
He just can’t stop trashing the military. Here he is saying that giving the Presidential Medal of Freedom to his top donor Miriam Adelman is better than the medal of honor because only broken down or dead soldiers get that one.
“They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead. She gets it and she’s a healthy beautiful woman.”
Trump: When we gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom… It’s the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor— it’s actually much better because everyone who gets the Congressional Medal, they’re soldiers. They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many… pic.twitter.com/a766KxAC2e
