Congressbusters, whaddya want?
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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
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.
You’re the weirdo!
The man is basically appearing in blackface with a bird’s nest on his head. His running mate has declared war on women with cats. MAGA is a total freakshow.
But sure…
Trump has repeatedly praised CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash for their “fairness” in the debate last month. He uses them as the example of everything a journalist should be. Why? Because they never fact checked him even once during the debate.
Apparently Trump expects that from everyone:
Moments before former President Trump took the stage at the National Association of Black Journalists annual convention in Chicago on Wednesday, the organization’s president was called back to address an issue. Trump did not want to be fact-checked live and was refusing to go on stage, NABJ president Ken Lemon told Axios. “[Trump’s team] said, ‘Well, can you not fact check? He’s not going to take the stage if you fact-check,'” Lemon said.
The Q&A with the GOP presidential nominee was delayed more than an hour before he eventually joined a panel of Black journalists, including ABC News correspondent Rachel Scott, Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner and Semafor reporter Kadia Goba.
At the time, President Trump blamed the delay on audio problems. Lemon told Axios, “There were audio problems, but they were resolved very quickly.” “The bigger problem was his threat not to take the stage when he had agreed to go on. He did not want to be fact-checked, but we could not let him on the stage without fact-checking,” Lemon said.
The stalemate was so prolonged that NABJ leaders were prepared to explain to the audience of nearly 2,000 people why Trump would not appear.
“I was prepared to go on stage to craft a statement, saying he decided not to go on stage because of fact-checking… we couldn’t compromise on that. As Lemon was preparing that statement, Trump walked onto the stage.
Yes, he went on stage and complained like some elderly dowager countess about being treated disrespectfully by the help when the reporter asked him tough questions about his record and previous comments. It was one of his most embarrassing encounters ever.
The campaign apparently asked them not to post the fact check or mention it on stage. But they did anyway, Good for them.
Andy Beshear is super popular
I don’t have a dog in the VP fight and will be fine with whomever she decides to choose. The Democrats are blessed with a very strong bench. But I was on Majority Report this week and Sam Seder told me about this. I was shocked:
After widespread speculation that Kentucky’s Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear was on the list of potential running mates for Vice President Kamala Harris ahead of the Democratic National Convention, a new poll found Beshear is the most popular Democratic governor in the country.
The Morning Consult poll shows Beshear has a 67% approval rating, with 28% disapproving, placing him at second place among all governors. He falls behind Vermont Republican Gov. Phil Scott who has an astounding 81% approval rating.
The poll, which was conducted from April to June this year, also showed that Beshear had the highest approval rating among both Republican and Democratic voters of any Democratic governor. He came second place in popularity with independents compared to other Democratic governors, too.
According to the poll, Beshear was more popular in his home state than other contenders for the Democratic vice presidential nomination appeared in theirs. For example, approval ratings for Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper were more than 10 percentage points lower than Beshear’s.
Beshear is also the second most popular Democratic governor with young voters, ages 18 to 34. Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland beat him with 66% popularity. Moore was just behind Beshear as one of the most popular governors in the country.
Beshear has previously shown up as a governor with a high approval rating in Morning Consult surveys, which has a 1.3 out of three stars pollster rating according to political analytics site FiveThirtyEight.
Think about that. He’s from Red Kentucky. Mitch McConnell’s home state. He’s not even in a swing state and he’s super popular. That must mean something. And he’s pretty progressive too although he has ways of speaking about progressive issues that appeals to more conservative voters.
We’ll find out soon enough who she’s going to pick but if she picks him I think it might be a good fit. He’s someone who can certainly challenge JD Vance’s dubious claims to Appalachian identity.
Masha Gesson’s amazing piece today in the NY Times about the prisoner swap is like something out of a John LeCarre novel. It’s absolutely riveting. If you read nothing else about this story, this is the one.
I am including a gift link so you can all read it. This is a short excerpt to whet the appetite:
Weeks after that phone call, Navalny flew back to Moscow and was immediately arrested. A year after that, “Navalny” was winning major awards and heading for an Oscar, and Grozev and Pevchikh were discussing how to leverage that success to secure Navalny’s release.
On that stroll around the reservoir, they came up with a crazy scheme they decided to call Secret Project Silver Lake. They wanted to organize a swap of Russian spies held in Western prisons for Navalny and other Russian political prisoners. When Pevchikh got back to where the team was staying, she Googled “Glienicke Bridge,” a crossing between what used to be East and West Berlin, the site of several prior prisoner swaps, including one that involved four countries and almost 30 people.
It was around this time that Grozev learned that Russia had sent a squad, or squads, of assassins to kill him. Austrian and American authorities warned him not to return to Vienna, where his wife and two children were. I met Grozev around the same time, and played a minor role in helping him get situated. Soon we started meeting every couple of weeks, for what I thought would eventually be a profile of him.
James P. Rubin, who was leading a State Department project on Russian disinformation (and who had recently watched “Navalny”), heard about Grozev’s situation, and offered a room in his own house.
Grozev moved in and spent the next couple of months explaining Secret Project Silver Lake, which Rubin would eventually take to his boss, Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
You just won’t believe it. That initiative led to international intrigue beyond anyone’s imagination culminating in what happened last night:
Jealous Trump, who now looks like a fool for saying Putin would never release Gershkovitz to anyone but him, had this sour comment:
That’s a total lie as I posted yesterday.
Not that reality actually means much, but here’s a little dose of it anyway:
At a rally in Pennsylvania on Wednesday, Donald Trump rolled out a new attack on Vice President Kamala Harris that showcased his well-known fondness for high-toned discourse: Her handling of immigration reveals her as not just weak, but also dumb.
The former president luridly claimed that Venezuelan gang members were “plotting to conduct ambush attacks” on American cops, then added: “All the while Harris and Biden sit in the White House and try to figure out who is dumber.” He proceeded to blame “Border Czar Harris” for a series of crimes by migrants, even though President Biden tasked her with addressing the root causes of Central American migration, while the Department of Homeland Security secures the border.
Unfortunately for Trump, unpublished DHS data shows that border encounters between ports of entry plummeted again to approximately 57,000 in July, according to an official familiar with the numbers. The data, which is preliminary until its official release in the coming days, was also leaked to CBS News and The New York Times. This is the fifth straight month of declining border crossings and the lowest monthly figure of the Biden administration. According to the Times, nine separate months during the Trump administration saw more border crossings than July under Biden did.
These numbers badly undermine Trump’s primary attack line on Harris—and not just in the most obvious way. It’s self-evident that declining migrant apprehensions counter Trump’s claim that the border is out of control due to alleged Biden-Harris weakness and stupidity. But it’s also important to dwell on why the numbers are falling, because this will demonstrate even more clearly that Trump’s ongoing attacks over this issue are nonsense—and that the truly “dumb” approach is Trump’s.
The dropping border numbers are often attributed to Biden’s new executive actions, announced in June, that effectively suspend asylum-seeking when border encounters rise above certain thresholds. The idea is that, if migrants can’t seek asylum here, it disincentivizes making the trek to the border to try to apply for it.
But there’s another reason for the dropping numbers: Mexico. As many immigration analysts have noted, Mexico has intensified its crackdown on migrants journeying north, bussing them back to the southernmost part of the country. That has served as a major impediment to migrants trying to journey from Central America to the U.S.-Mexico border.
Little is known about the precise role that Biden played in getting Mexico to institute this crackdown. But Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, says most analysts agree that Biden’s private diplomacy with Mexican President Andres Manuel López Obrador played a crucial part. “Increased Mexican enforcement efforts have clearly played a big role in bringing the number of migrants reaching the U.S. border down in the past few months,” Selee told me.
This story is in TNR. But it should be on the front page of the NY Times. Just as people believe that the economy is terrible even though it has been roaring they also believe that the border is in crisis despite the fact that it is actually much improved — because they simply don’t hear about it.
Meanwhile, the US Government seems to be pretty good at stopping drugs from coming over the border:
Around 4 million fentanyl pills, weighing more than 1,000 pounds were seized in the largest fentanyl bust in U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s history on July 1. A second seizure on July 12 resulted in another 270 pounds of meth being taken off the streets.
Combined, the two massive drug busts took millions of dollars out of the hands of drug smuggling organizations, according to a release. “This is an enormous amount of dangerous drugs that officers at the Port of Lukeville prevented from reaching communities throughout the United States,” said Guadalupe Ramierez, the Director of Field Operations at the Tucson office.
In the first incident, a 20-year-old from Arizona arrived at the port of entry with a customized 2011 pick-up truck carrying a trailer with a sport utility vehicle being towed on it. Officers noticed alterations to the frame of the trailer, which tipped them off to perform an additional inspection. The additional inspection revealed 234 packages concealed in the trailer frame that contained 4 million pills of fentanyl.
In the second seizure, officers discovered 270 pounds of meth transported similarly, in a pick-up truck towing a utility trailer.
In neither case were undocumented migrants carrying the drugs over the border in their backpacks.
Trump’s close adviser, the literally insane Laura Loomer, posted the following and Trump retweeted it:
In case you need something to send to a brainwashed relative to prove Harris is Black, here’s a picture of her and her father:
He’s still alive:
Her father is Black. Clearly. He was born in Jamaica. And she has always identified as Black and Indian which is what she is. Like tens of millions of other bi-racial Americans, she identifies as both. And also like most Black Americans she has a slave owner forefather. Do these people have any idea what they are saying?
This is so dumb I can hardly wrap my mind around it. But get ready. It’s going to be a thing.
The fault lies not in their candidates
“Trump didn’t change the party, he revealed it,” Stuart Stevens (“It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump“) tells The Daily Blast. It’s a view the former Republican says he forced himself to admit. Lee Atwater’s1981 confession about the Southern Strategy was more than a political strategy. It was an admission that it would work on racist sentiments present among the GOP base.
“We were very aware of this ugly, dark side,” Stevens says of himself, Nicole Wallace, and other Bush administration colleagues. “But we thought it was a recessive gene, and that we were the dominant gene.” They thought their party would move their way, just out of political practicality. It did not. Stevens tells Greg Sargent he did not write another of those “if only they’d listened to me” books. Because the GOP did listen to him.
“American conservatism is a failed intellectual exercise,” Stevens concludes. It is no longer a political party but an extremist movement. “The Republican Party went to war with the modern world, and is losing.”
The fault, as Cassius declared, is not in the GOP’s stars (or in Trump), but in themselves.
Take half an hour to listen and reflect.
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For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.
When the going gets tough
TFG has had many bad weeks, but the last couple have been especially bad. Vice President Kamala Harris now leads in some national and swing state polls. President Joe Biden’s success in winning (hear that word, Donnie?) the release of prisoners held in Russia has TFG flummoxed. His “unmitigated caucasity” (as a friend put it) in explaining blackness to the National Association of Black Journalists has neither won him friends nor expanded his voting base.
Now the orange-hued, former wrestling promoter is trying to brand Harris as dumb and — xenophobia being his signature chokeslam — as failed “Border Czar Harris.” In TFG’s dim mind, the Biden approach is both weak and dumb.
Actual data undercut that argument, Greg Sargent observes. Not that facts mean anything on the right. Border crossings have dropped for the fifth straight month per unpublished data obtained by CBS News and The New York Times, Sargent explains:
These numbers badly undermine Trump’s primary attack line on Harris—and not just in the most obvious way. It’s self-evident that declining migrant apprehensions counter Trump’s claim that the border is out of control due to alleged Biden-Harris weakness and stupidity. But it’s also important to dwell on why the numbers are falling, because this will demonstrate even more clearly that Trump’s ongoing attacks over this issue are nonsense—and that the truly “dumb” approach is Trump’s.
The dropping border numbers are often attributed to Biden’s new executive actions, announced in June, that effectively suspend asylum-seeking when border encounters rise above certain thresholds. The idea is that, if migrants can’t seek asylum here, it disincentivizes making the trek to the border to try to apply for it.
The Biden-Harris approach involves thinking and diplomacy:
But there’s another reason for the dropping numbers: Mexico. As many immigration analysts have noted, Mexico has intensified its crackdown on migrants journeying north, bussing them back to the southernmost part of the country. That has served as a major impediment to migrants trying to journey from Central America to the U.S.-Mexico border.
Little is known about the precise role that Biden played in getting Mexico to institute this crackdown. But Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, says most analysts agree that Biden’s private diplomacy with Mexican President Andres Manuel López Obrador played a crucial part.
[…]
In other words, the declining numbers don’t merely illustrate that Biden’s asylum restrictions are having an impact. They also show that viewing the problem as one to be solved in no small part through diplomacy in the Americas—as Harris deeply believes to be true—is also the smarter approach. (The entire Trump attack is also nonsense for other reasons: There’s no link between migration and crime, and crime is sharply down under Biden in any case.)
Trump’s preference is the immigration equivalent of Tim The Tool Man’s always disastrous “more power.” More wall. More punishment. More shoot-them-in-the-legs.
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For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.