The corporate media continues to bash President Biden and ignore Donald Trump’s insane rally speeches and his frightening plans for our future.
Trump held a rally last night after at least 10 days of golfing instead of campaigning. The rally wasn’t in a swing state though–he held it at his Doral golf course in Florida. Why isn’t the media calling him lazy?
Here’s a summary of the looney word salad Trump spewed last night. From @ArtCandee on Twitter:
Oh boy. Trump’s Doral rally tonight was a doozy. Let’s recap it:
He started off by bragging about his golf course instead of apologizing for being an hour late and leaving people waiting all day under a heat advisory.
He said he didn’t know what NATO was.
He bragged that “being indicted is a lot of fun.”
He claimed “tens of thousands” of people showed up to this sad little rally.
He later said “45,000 people” when it barely looked like 2k people were there.
He froze like a deer in headlights for 10 straight seconds.
He praised Laura Loomer and repeatedly called her “amazing.”
He’s mad that Kamala Harris laughs and called her “L-a-f-f-i-n’ Kamala,” proving what we already knew that bro can’t spell.
He said he wants a “no holds barred” debate without moderators this week. Essentially the two of them screaming at each other. Super dumb idea. Especially when Biden is hosting the NATO summit.
He also challenged President Biden to a golf tournament this week when President Biden is busy meeting with NATO leaders and doing his job.
He said Biden “doesn’t know what a synagogue is.”
He thinks you have to stop electric cars every hour.
He complained about the heat only 16 minutes in, when those people waited all day and he still showed up an hour late.
He said someone told him that he looks “great in a bathing suit.” Barf.
He called the fictional Hannibal Lecter “a lovely man” and compared him to immigrants.
He said migrants are “preying on everybody.”
He forgot how to say “feared” and said “field.” He said he’d be the “greatest president that God has ever created.”
He claimed Hunter Biden is running the country.
He babbled about facelifts.
He said he was going to bring Tom Homan back into his administration, a guy who helped author Project 2025 which he claims to know nothing about.
He claimed Biden has more homes than him.
He said we’ll become “energy independent” when we already are right now.
He complained some more about the hot weather.
He asked why “sweaty” golf caddies “never touched me, never hugged me, never kissed me.”
He made fun of Chris Christie’s weight while claiming he was standing up for him. Mighty rich.
He said the U.S. is turning into “communist Cuba or socialist Venezuela.”
He struggled to pronounce some of his sycophants’ names.
He called Don Jr. “a great talent” and that he has a “great wife” even though he’s not married to Kimberly Guilfoyle.
He said how much he loves his family showing up when his wife Melania and favorite daughter Ivanka didn’t even bother going.
He said “October 7th would not have happened” if he was President.
He said Israel “had no money.”
He said “we have nuclear submarines and five warships in Cuba,” essentially calling himself a Russian.
He said Biden has abandoned Cuba when he was the one who nixed Obama’s plan to reopen trade and travel to Cuba.
He said people get “shot, mugged, raped” when visiting the Washington Monument in DC.
He said he will protect the second amendment and “innocent life” in the same breath.
He told people to “vote whenever you want.”
He played a song performed by J6 insurrectionists and people who beat up police officers.
He read his teleprompter cue to speak quickly out loud.
He said that getting rid of energy efficiency in appliances will “keep our enemies at bay.”
He called the United States of America “a third-world country” and said we’re “a joke.”
He said President Biden “isn’t legally allowed to stand trial.”
He’s claiming that the stock market is high because of MAGA winning the election in November, and that it will crash like during the Great Depression if he loses.
He said it’s “easier to get fentanyl than groceries.”
He forgot how to say the word “economy.”
He said he’d rather take money from small dollar donors instead of the wealthy.
He said they’re “going to take over our Capitol.”
He lied like he breathes.
And we all know the media won’t cover HALF of this absolute train wreck.
House Democrats met Tuesday to discuss President Joe Biden’s candidacy, but one lawmaker wanted to know why the press has spent a second week on that story instead of looking at recently released Florida court documents in the Jeffrey Epstein case.
“We hear a lot from our constituents on different issues,” Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) said at the news conference Tuesday. “But something I’ve heard that doesn’t seem to be being covered are the Epstein files.”
“And by the way, he was convicted in a civil court for sexual assault and convicted in a state court for 34 felonies. Donald Trump should drop out of the race,” said Lieu….
In a surprise move, Circuit Judge Luis Delgado ordered the documents be released last week, shortly before the Fourth of July holiday.
“The testimony taken by the Grand Jury concerns activity ranging from grossly unacceptable to rape — all of the conduct at issue is sexually deviant, disgusting, and criminal,” the judge wrote.
Palm Beach County Clerk of Courts Joseph Abruzzo worked for the past three years trying to get the records released to the public, The Washington Post reported.
“The public, and the victims specifically, want to know how he was able to get a slap on the wrist and go on for decades, continuing these heinous acts to hundreds, or more, underage girls or women,” he said.
Insider’s Jacob Shamsian explained that Trump is the likely individual referred to as “Doe 174.” It identified the individual as saying, “I wish her well,” when referring to Epstein’s girlfriend and accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, who is now serving 20 years in prison for her involvement….
“It’s easy to see where Trump fits into them,” Insider said. “They are all transcripts of depositions from Ransome, Giuffre, and Epstein’s Palm Beach housekeeper Juan Alessi, all of whom were asked about Epstein’s relationships with celebrities and other powerful people.”
Alex Katz, Red Roses with Blue, 2001
Trump has been trying to dissociate himself from the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025,” even though most of the people working on it are former members of the first Trumpadministration.
With all the focus in recent weeks on President Joe Biden’s age-related limitations, it’s worth remembering that Donald Trump’s incessant falsehoods and self-proclaimed desire to be a dictator on Day 1 make him far more unfit for the presidency. The latest Trump lie that should be garnering more attention is his attempt to distance himself from Project 2025: “I know nothing about Project 2025,” he posted on Truth Social last week. “I have no idea who is behind it.” That statement is demonstrably false. It reflects an attempt to deceive American voters about the dictatorship a second Trump term would bring.
The reasons that Trump is unfit are manifest. He is a convicted felon and inveterate liar who coddles the nation’s adversaries and threatens its allies. His 30-plus falsehoods in the debate were no less disqualifying than Biden’s age. But most concerning of all are his plans for autocracy, which we document in our American Autocracy Threat Tracker. We detail Trump’s own promise to be a dictator “on Day 1” of his presidency, to “terminate” or reject the Constitution, and to stretch the law to carry out his extreme policies—such as mass deportations (by military force if necessary) and concentration camps for immigrants lacking permanent legal status.
Dictatorship cannot of course be accomplished by one person alone. That’s why, in our Threat Tracker, we also document the autocratic proposals made by Trump’s campaign, allies, and enablers. First among them—and until now embraced by Trump—are the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025, an 887-page document that outlines how Trump could arrogate unprecedented power in the presidency and eradicate checks on presidential control. In our tracker, we catalog how Project 2025 “proposes to dismantle or radically overhaul the Departments of Justice and State; eliminate the Departments of Homeland Security, Education, and Commerce; radically repurpose other agencies; and eviscerate the professional civil service.” One “immediate priority” discussed by leaders of Project 2025 are proposals for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act to suppress domestic dissent and violence.
That plan exemplifies the danger lurking beneath this extreme project, as hinted at by last week’s discussion of bloodshed. The president of the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025’s parent organization, Kevin Roberts, said, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” The Heritage Foundation subsequently quote-tweeted this clip with one word: “Yes.”
Contrary to Trump’s disavowal, Project 2025 has been conceived, staffed, and endorsed by a plethora of Trump insiders—including some of the former president’s most senior and influential advisers. Notably, John McEntee, a powerful figure in the Trump administration as the director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, is a senior adviser to the effort and has helped spearhead its lists of potential Trump administration staffers. And Stephen Miller, a top Trump aide, is “one of the most powerful architects” of Project 2025, Axios has reported.
The list of Trump-affiliated figures who have played a role in Project 2025 does not stop there. It also includes Ben Carson, Trump’s ex–secretary of housing and urban development; Peter Navarro, the White House trade adviser under Trump; and Russ Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump. Vought is yet another central player in the former president’s orbit: He drafted a key chapter in Project 2025 and is now the policy director for the committee writing the Republican National Committee’s policy platform. And there are many other lower-profile Trump advisers involved in Project 2025, as we discuss in our Threat Tracker.
Meanwhile, Trump’s super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., has been running ads promoting a website called Trump Project 2025. And figures like Miller and Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt have previously appeared in online advertisements promoting Project 2025.
Retribution is at the center of Donald Trump’s third presidential election campaign.
“I am your warrior,” Trumpproclaimed earlier this year. “I am your justice, and for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”
Trump’s loyal surrogates have duly embraced the project — perhaps no one more zealously than Ivan Raiklin, a retired Army Reserve lieutenant colonel and former U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency employee, who bills himself as the former and would-be president’s “future secretary of retribution.”
Raiklin is seeking to enlist so-called “constitutional” sheriffs in rural, conservative counties across the country to detain Trump’s political enemies. Or, as he says, carry out “live-streamed swatting raids” against individuals on his “Deep State target list.”
“This is a deadly serious report,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) told Raw Story. “A retired U.S. military officer has drawn up a ‘Deep State target list’ of public officials he considers traitors, along with our family members and staff. His hit list is a vigilante death warrant for hundreds of Americans and a clear and present danger to the survival of American democracy and freedom.” [….]
The list Raiklin has been circulating since January is extensive.
It includes numerous Democratic and Republican elected officials; FBI and intelligence officials; members of the House Select January 6 Committee; U.S. Capitol Police officers and civilian employees; witnesses in Trump’s two impeachment trials and the Jan. 6 committee hearings; and journalists from publications ranging from CNN and the Washington Post to Reuters and Raw Story — all considered political enemies of Trump.
Julie Farnam, a former U.S. Capitol Police employee named on the list who as assistant director of intelligence and interagency coordination warned about the potential for violence in advance of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack, said she would not be intimidated by the list.
“Any hit list is designed to impart the silence and fear of those named on it,” Farnam told Raw Story. “But silence is victory for those who write such lists. Conversely, speaking the truth without fear will always be the undoing of those who seek to intimidate and spread hate in our world. I can never be silenced.”
In addition to Farnam, the list includes nine current or former U.S. Capitol Police employees. The agency declined to comment for this story.
Raw Story is not publishing the full list given the potential risk posed to people unaware that they’re on it.
Many of the people on the “retribution” list are journalists. This story is behind a paywall, but those are the basics. Here’s a bit more:
Who is Ivan Raiklin?
As the 2020 election approached, conspiracy minded Trump supporters with active Twitter accounts were in abundance. Most never broke through the incessant MAGA noise, or merely added another note to its election denialism dissonance.
Raiklin was different.
He was a seasoned veteran with a background in military intelligence who wound up playing a small but significant role in the effort to overturn the 2020 election in Trump’s name.
Bouquet of Flowers by Edouard Manet (1882)
Following a distinguished career in the U.S. Armed Forces in which he served as a military attaché to the former Soviet Republic of Georgia and foreign affairs specialist assigned to the Ukraine Crisis Team, Raiklin left the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2017 to run for U.S. Senate in Virginia, according to the Washington Post.
At the time, Raiklin’s candidacy in 2018 provided little indication of the MAGA loyalist relishing the destruction of Trump’s enemies that he would become….
Following his disappointing foray into electoral politics, Raiklin began his turn toward Trump’s MAGA movement.
In 2019, he appeared at a QAnon-themed fundraiser for retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, whom Raiklin met in 2010. (Flynn and Raiklin have become close in recent years, with Raiklin urging Trump to select Flynn as his vice presidential running mate and Flynn featuring Raiklin in his current speaking tour.)
Roughly a week after the 2020 election, when major media outlets had called the election for Democratic candidate Joe Biden, Raiklin went on Alex Jones’ conspiracy theory show InfoWars and confidently predicted that Trump would ultimately obtain the necessary number of electoral votes to secure reelection.
“I absolutely guarantee it,” he said. “One hundred percent. Unequivocally. Full stop. There is no possibility that he does not reach 270.”
It’s a classic example of how Trump’s followers often act on Trump’s wishes or anticipate his desires without receiving specific directives.
For months, Trump had been saying that the only way he’d lose the election is if Democrats stole it through fraud. Now, Trump had lost, and Raiklin was arguing that Trump was winning, against all evidence.
Raiklin, in essence, operates as an agent of Trumpism independent of Trump.
And as the 2024 election nears, the same dynamic is apparent: Trump articulates the broad themes, and his supporters scramble to put them into practice.
“Stand back and stand by” set the stage for the Jan. 6 insurrection in 2021, and now, “I am your retribution” serves as a solicitation to supporters such as Raiklin to put together specific plans for retribution against Trump’s political enemies.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for the NYT and WaPo to cover this story. They are working overtime trying to normalize Trump, while attacking Biden.
The Justice Departmentannounced on Tuesday that the U.S. has disrupted a Russian disinformation campaign involving Artificial intelligence-powered bots that created fake profiles on the X social media platform.
It’s President Vladimir Putin’s answer to the terrifying Skynet artificial intelligence network from the Terminator movies.
Government officials seized two internet domains and searched through 968 X accounts that they accuse Russia of using to create an AI “bot farm,” which the department said “Used elements of AI to create fictitious social media profiles—often purporting to belong to individuals in the United States—which the operators then used to promote messages in support of Russian government objectives,” according to the statement.
The U.S. action was, “The first in disrupting a Russian-sponsored Generative AI-enhanced social media bot farm,” said FBI Director Christopher Wray.
The court document read that the operation was devised by the deputy editor-in-chief at RT, formerly known as Russia Today, a Kremlin-run Russian news organization based in Moscow, in 2022. The goal was to spread RT’s standard television news broadcast on social media. It was part of a Kremlin-approved and funded project run by a Russian intelligence officer.
Russia’s efforts to influence this year’s U.S. election through information warfare have the same aim as in previous elections — to undermine President Joe Biden’s campaign and the Democratic Party and weaken public confidence in the electoral process, intelligence officials said Tuesday.
Lilacs in a Window by Mary Cassatt (1880)
Russia’s election influence operations, which include covert social media accounts and encrypted direct messaging channels, are targeting key voter groups in swing states to exploit political divisions in the U.S. and erode support for Ukraine in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion, officials with the Office of the Director National Intelligence, or ODNI, told reporters.
Asked whether Russia’s information campaign is trying to boost or undermine one of the presidential candidates, an ODNI official said: “We have not observed a shift in Russia’s preferences for the presidential race from past elections, given the role the U.S. is playing with regard to Ukraine and broader policy toward Russia.”
In its assessments of previous elections dating to 2016, the intelligence community concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime sought to sway American public opinion in favor of Donald Trump’s candidacy and denigrate the Democratic Party and its presidential nominees.
Former U.S. intelligence officials and regional analysts say the Kremlin has long viewed Trump as more sympathetic to Russia, citing his frequently expressed skepticism toward the NATO alliance, his reluctance to criticize Putin and his critical portrayal of Ukraine’s government.
“Nice of All The King’s Men to provide their exalted Royal with an easy-to-read version of Project 2025 with lots of pictures.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
I spent some time this weekend talking to happy and relieved friends from the UK and France. I cannot say that anyone I know in this country is either happy or relieved right now. For the first time in 40 years, the Tories lost control. One of my friends, a retired secondary school teacher for a Catholic school in the Midlands, expressed joy at the possibility of what’s ahead. Can you imagine that feeling here? The BBC is reporting on what’s up next as the new government is formed.
Sir Keir Starmer is the UK’s new prime minister, after his Labour Party swept to power in a landslide general election victory.
The Conservative Party suffered a dramatic collapse after a tumultuous 14 years in power, which saw five different prime ministers run the country. It lost 250 seats over the course of a devastating night.
Rishi Sunak – the outgoing PM – accepted responsibility for the result and apologised to defeated colleagues during a brief statement outside a rainy 10 Downing Street. He said he would resign as party leader in the coming weeks.
In his first speech as prime minister after greeting dozens of jubilant Labour supporters who had lined Downing Street, Sir Keir vowed to run a “government of service” and to kick start a period of “national renewal”.
“For too long we’ve turned a blind eye as millions slid into greater insecurity,” he said. “I want to say very clearly to those people. Not this time.”
“Changing a country is not like flicking a switch. The world is now a more volatile place. This will take a while, but have no doubt the work of change will begin immediately.”
The French are also celebrating in the streets. I discussed the results with my exchange High School French Teacher, who also taught in Southeast Asia and was in Vietnam with his now wife when Saigon fell. They presently run a Vietnamese restaurant in Nice. He expressed relief. This report is by CNN’s Christian Edwards. “What happened in France’s shock election, and what comes next?”
It was meant to be a coronation. Crowds of supporters had crammed into election night events at the RN party HQ in Paris and at outposts all over the country, to watch the moment many felt had been decades in the making: Confirmation that their party, and its long-taboo brand of anti-immigrant politics, had won the most seats in the French parliament.
That wasn’t to be. The fervent atmosphere soured as supporters saw the RN had slumped to third place. Jordan Bardella, the 28-year-old leader handpicked by Le Pen to freshen the party’s image and purge it of its racist and antisemitic roots, was dyspeptic. He railed against the “dangerous electoral deals” made between the NFP and Ensemble which had “deprived the French people” of an RN-led government.
“By deciding to deliberately paralyze our institutions, Emmanuel Macron has now pushed the country towards uncertainty and instability,” Bardella said, dismissing the NFP as an “alliance of dishonor.”
“Of course the conflicted convicted felon claims to know nothing about Project 2025.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Well, Bardella sounds rather grumpy Trumpy, doesn’t he? Still, both of our oldest allies have shown us the path away from Donald and MAGA. Notice it means we have to absolutely swamp the voting booths. It appears that Project 2025 is scaring Americans, which it rightly should. Amplification of the Fascist Manifesto has gotten us to the point that Donald denies he knows anything about it. Historian Timothy Synder has an excellent analysis of the situation in his Thinking About Substack. “Fascism and Fear. The Moment, The Media, The Election.”
It should seem odd that media calls to step down were not first directed to Trump. If we are calling for Biden to step aside because someone must stop Trump from bringing down the republic, then surely it would have made more sense to first call for Trump to step aside? (The Philadelphia Inquirer did). I know the counter-arguments: his people wouldn’t have cared, and he wouldn’t have listened. The first misses an important point. There are quite a few Americans who have not made up their minds. The second amounts to obeying in advance. If you accept that a fascist is beyond your reach, you have normalized your submission.
When media folks describe discussions among Democrats as chaos and disarray, they are implicitly suggesting that it is better for a leader of a party to never be questioned. (Why, after all, is being part of an array a good thing?) An obvious point goes missed: Democrats can say what they want, because none of them is afraid. And that is good! Governor Maura Healey can express her dissent and Joe Biden can express his frustration with her — but no one is worried about her physical safety.
Trump, by contrast, controls his party through stochastic terror, threats issued through social media that his cult followers can be expected to realize. Republicans leave politics because they fear for themselves and their families. Those who remain all obey in advance. That is new, and it should not be normal, and it should not spread any further. But it becomes normal when we treat discussions, and not coercion, as abnormal.
If I am right that much of the energy behind the Biden pile-on is displaced fear of a regime change, much of the media will continue to generate fascist froth for Trump, whether or not Biden is the Democratic nominee — unless, of course, journalists confront their fears, and keep the issue of regime change inside the story, and provide a constructive alternative alongside personal criticism.
Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen of Axios focus on “Behind the Curtain: Trump’s dream regime.”
So let’s dig into each component of the Republican fantasy:
A strong president indifferent to pressure. Well, that’s Trump. He has long held that his power in office is virtually unchecked. The Supreme Court just added another layer of protection. The Justices ruled in Trump v. U.S. that presidents enjoy immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within their core constitutional duties, and presumptive immunity for other official acts. It’ll take years to sort out the elasticity of immunity — but it’s wide.
A compliant, Republican-controlled Congress. It’s a coin toss who wins the House and Senate this year — much like it has been throughout this era of a 50-50 America. The Senate looks promising for the GOP, thanks to a favorable map that has Democrats playing defense in deep-red West Virginia, Montana and Ohio, plus five swing states. The House is harder, mainly because there are lots more Republicans in Biden-won districts than vice versa.
A conservative Supreme Court. A 6-3 majority is significant, as the most recent decisions showed. It was the six Republican-appointed justices who expanded presidential power. The three Democrats warned of a looming monarchy.
A weakened administrative state. The Court, in a series of rulings but most notably the reversal of the Chevron decision, handed Republicans a massive triumph in a 40-year war to weaken independent agencies. It basically ruled that individual bureaucrats and independent agencies can no longer set the rules for business regulation.
Purge hostile federal employees. Right now, a lot of the nitty-gritty of governing is handled by full-time civil servants who aren’t political appointees and often operate outside the full control of the president. But Trump has threatened to firetens of thousands of these civil servants and replace them with pre-vetted loyalists.
The intrigue: Trump last week tried to distance himself from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which is recruiting loyalists to help carry out radical plans to transform the U.S. government.
He claimed to “know nothing about Project 2025.” Truth is, Project 2025 was largely written by his allies and encapsulates a lot of what he hopes to do — and how he might do it, longtime Trump officials tell us.
Instead of continually polling about Biden’s age and debate performance, why don’t they poll on Project 2025? Frankly, if I were up there on the campaign staff right now, I’d actually be pushing polling on it. Donald is aware of how much of the language plays with mainstream America. This Washington Post article by Michael Scherer and Josh Dawsey makes me wonder what the result could be. “Trump proposes scaled-back platform that softens language on abortion, same-sex marriage. The draft was circulated Monday among members of the 2024 Republican convention platform committee. It will be discussed and voted on later this week.”
The 2024 Republican convention platform committee quickly adopted the plank that Donald Trump and his aides had drafted during a meeting Monday in Milwaukee, despite the concerns of some antiabortion activists that the document stopped short of explicitly calling for a constitutional amendment to give embryos or fetuses constitutional rights and does not call for any national bans on abortion.
The final vote, according to a person who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the closed-door proceedings, was 84-18.
The document, with a long introduction in the voice of Trump, the presumptive nominee, says that existing constitutional rights to due process grants states the power “to pass laws protecting those rights.”
“After 51 years, because of us, that power has been given to the states and to a vote of the people,” the document says, according a copy of the document obtained by The Washington Post. “We will oppose late term abortion while supporting mothers and policies that advance prenatal care, access to birth control, and IVF (fertility treatments).”
The document was presented Monday to members of the Republican convention platform committee, a group handpicked by leaders of the Trump campaign that includes some members who want stronger language around abortion. The 2016 platform, which Trump used in his 2020 reelection campaign, called for a constitutional amendment to affirm the constitutional due process rights of embryos and fetuses, and a national law that would ban abortion, with some exceptions, after about 20 weeks of gestation.
Trump has changed his position on the issue since that Supreme Court overturned the fundamental right to the procedure in earlier stages of pregnancy. He now argues that each state should come up with its own regulations. He no longer calls for a constitutional amendment that would bar all states from allowing the procedure, a point of contention for many antiabortion activists.
If the justices did not wield such awesome power, and if lawyers who practice before them did not have to treat them with ritualized obsequiousness, most of the justices would be laughingstocks. Few people this famous are so ostentatiously bad at their jobs.
I used to believe that Trump and his followers and the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group that played an enormous role in choosing his judges, were two distinct authoritarian movements that shared power during Trump’s four years in office. The MAGA movement is a cult of personality that seeks to elevate a singularly chaotic man. The Federalist Society and its allies prefer a distinctly lawful tyranny that still follows predictable rules.
But then the Federalist Society’s picks took over the Supreme Court. And they have behaved so haphazardly, with such eagerness to smash institutions built over decades or even centuries, that it’s hard to see them as anything other than Donald Trump with a law degree. Unlike Trump, the Court’s Republican majority speaks in polished legal prose when they decide to hurl decades worth of settled expectations into the sun. But their behavior on the bench is no less chaotic than that of the insurrectionist president who appointed half of them.
Worse, the United States has what might be called a Dunning-Kruger Supreme Court — after the psychological phenomenon where incompetent people fail to recognize their own incompetence.
The justices aren’t just very bad at their jobs; they appear to be blissfully unaware of just how terrible they are at those jobs. How else can one explain, say, their decision to replace all of American Second Amendment law with a novel and impossible-to-apply legal test — one that led to astonishingly depraved results — and then to offer no new guidance to lower court judges after all but one of the justices realized just how badly they’d screwed up?
What is that old saying about the ends justify the means? We’re under another intense heat warning today. The western half of the state is dealing with Hurricane Beryl. Climate change denial should be getting much more difficult down here in the South, but denial is strong in this Republican Party. They prefer to stew like that proverbial frog in a pot. Let’s just hope we can turn voters out like the UK and France and be rid of these suckers for a long time.
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The U.S. media and the pundit class are still trying to drive Joe Biden out of the presidential race, and I’m sick and tired of it. These privileged people have the wherewithal to leave the country if Trump gets back in the White House; I don’t.
I see no evidence that Biden is experiencing “cognitive decline,” and he certainly does not have dementia. Democrats should be rallying around Biden, whether they like him personally or not. He is the only thing standing between us and a MAGA dictatorship. Biden needs to stay in the race and beat Trump. He did it once; I believe he can do it again.
Once he’s elected, if Biden wants to retire before the end of his term, Kamala Harris will be there to take over. If he leaves now, Harris will likely be unable to appoint someone as VP, because both houses of Congress have to confirm her choice. The Republicans would joyfully block anyone she picks.
Last night Biden submitted to an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. I tried to watch it, but I had to turn it off. Stephanopoulos’s questions were ignorant, insulting, and patronizing. I just couldn’t handle it. You can read the full transcript at ABC News.
I am not usually one to offer diagnoses of people I’ve never met, but it does seem like the pundit class of the American media is suffering from severe memory loss. Because they’re doing exactly what they did in the 2016 presidential race – providing wildly asymmetrical and inflammatory coverage of the one candidate running against Donald J Trump.
They have become a stampeding herd producing an avalanche of stories suggesting Biden is unfit, will lose, and should go away, at a point in the campaign in which replacing him would likely be somewhere between extremely difficult and utterly catastrophic. They do this while ignoring something every scholar and critic of journalism knows well and every journalist should. As Nikole Hannah-Jones put it: “As media we consistently proclaim that we are just reporting the news when in fact we are driving it. What we cover, how we cover it, determines often what Americans think is important and how they perceive these issues yet we keep pretending it’s not so.” They are not reporting that he is a loser; they are making him one.
According to one journalist’s tally, the New York Times has run 192 stories on the subject since the debate, including 50 editorials and 142 news stories. The Washington Post, which has also gone for saturation coverage, published a resignation speech they wrote for him. Not to be outdone, the New Yorker’s editor-in-chief declared that Biden not going away “would be an act not only of self-delusion but of national endangerment” and had a staff writer suggest that Democrats should use the never-before-deployed 25th amendment.
Since this would have to be led by Vice-President Kamala Harris, it would be a sort of insider coup. And so it goes with what appears to be a journalistic competition to outdo each other in the aggressiveness of the attacks and the unreality of the proposals. It’s a dogpile and a panic, and there is no one more unable to understand their own emotional life, biases, and motives than people who are utterly convinced of their own ironclad rationality and objectivity, AKA most of these pundits.
Serial Cuddlers, by Daniel Ryan
Speaking of coups, we’ve had a couple of late, which perhaps merit attention as we consider who is unfit to hold office. This time around, Trump is not just a celebrity with a lot of sexual assault allegations, bankruptcies, and loopily malicious statements, as he was in 2016. He’s a convicted criminal who orchestrated a coup attempt to steal an election both through backroom corruption and public lies and through a violent attack on Congress. The extremist US supreme court justices he selected during his last presidential term have themselves staged a coup this very Monday, overthrowing the US constitution itself and the principle that no one is above the law to make presidents into kings, just after legalizing bribery of officials, and dismantling the regulatory state by throwing out the Chevron deference.
His own former staffers are part of the Heritage Foundation’s team planning to implement Project 25 if Trump wins, which would finish off our system of government with yet another coup. “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” said the foundation’s president the other day. This alarms me. So does the behavior of the US mainstream media, which seems more concerned with sabotaging the only thing standing between us and this third coup.
“Why aren’t we talking about Trump’s fascism?” demands the headline of Jeet Heer’s piece in the Nation, to which the answer might be a piece by the Nation’s own editor-in-chief titled “Biden’s patriotic duty” that proposes his duty is to get lost. Sometimes I wonder if all this coverage is because the media know how to cover a normal problem like a sub-par candidate; they don’t know how to cover something as abnormal and unprecedented as the end of the Republic. So for the most part they don’t.
Biden is old. He was one kind of appalling in the 27 June debate, listless and sometimes stumbling and muddling his words. But Trump was another kind of appalling, in that almost everything he said was an outrageous lie and some of it was a threat. I get that writing about the monstrosity that is Trump faces the problem that it’s not news; he’s been a monster spouting lurid nonsense all his life (but his political crimes are recent, and his free-associating public soliloquies on sharks, batteries, toilets, water flow, and Hannibal Lector, among other topics, are genuinely demented). He’s a racist, a fascist, and a rapist (according to a civil-court verdict).
We are deciding if this nation has a future as a more-or-less democratic Republic this November, and on that rides the fate of the earth when it comes to acting on climate change. If the US falters at this decisive moment in the climate crisis, it will drag down everyone else’s efforts. Under Trump, it will. But the shocking supreme court decisions this summer and the looming threat of authoritarianism have gotten little ink and air, compared to the hue and cry about Biden’s competence.
President Joe Biden registered his best showing yet in a Bloomberg News/Morning Consult tracking poll of battleground states, even as voters offered withering appraisals of his debate performance amid panic within his party.
Cat in a cardboard box, by Ruskin Spear
Republican Donald Trump led Democrat Biden by only 2 percentage points, 47% to 45%, in the critical states needed to win the November election. That’s the smallest gap since the poll began last October. Biden now leads Trump in Michigan and Wisconsin. He’s within the poll’s statistical margin of error in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina, and is farthest behind in the critical state of Pennsylvania.
Swing-state voters thought Biden acquitted himself poorly in the debate, with fewer than one in five respondents saying the 81-year-old was the more coherent, mentally fit or dominant participant.
The poll results land as the Democratic Party finds itself in an extraordinary bind mere weeks before its nominating convention. To pressure Biden into releasing delegates would be to abandon a candidate who has beaten Trump before and has portrayed his debate debacle as the latest surmountable setback in a career marked by personal tragedies and three previous White House campaigns.
Voters’ reactions to Biden’s debate performance:
The Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll is the first comprehensive survey of the states most likely to decide the outcome in the Electoral College since the debate on June 27. Its findings run counter to some recent national polls, which showed a worsening picture for Biden. The poll could turn out to be a statistical outlier.
While the results show a “modest boost” in concerns about Biden’s mental acuity, they’re “nothing to match the level of alarm expressed by prominent voices in the Democratic Party,” said Eli Yokley, US political analyst for Morning Consult. “This suggests the age matter was already baked into most voters’ minds: The only difference now is more Democrats are acknowledging it.”
The view from the swing states could be affected by an advertising blitz from Biden and his Democratic allies, who have lately outspent their Republican rivals 5-to-1 in those places.
The Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll also started four days after the debate — later than some national polls — giving voters more time to evaluate Biden’s performance.
The poll’s first responses came on the day the Supreme Court granted Trump immunity for criminal acts he may have committed as part of his “official responsibilities.” The issue of democracy now rivals immigration as the second-biggest concern among swing-state voters, and it’s one of few issues — including climate change, abortion and health care — where Biden enjoys a significant edge in voter trust.
Read more if you can get past the paywall. I signed up for free articles for one day.
NBC News has a gossipy article about supposed conflicts between President Biden’s family and staff. I’m no going to quote from it; it’s very similar to the gossip column-like pieces that the NYT and WaPo like to publish. But here’s a link, if you want to read it. It’s quite melodramatic, so have a fainting couch and smelling salts handy: ‘It’s Shakespearean’: Long-simmering tensions between Biden’s family and aides spill out.
Meanwhile, Trump is up to no good, as usual. He and his thugs have noticed that Americans might not want to have an unfettered strongman in place of a normal president. They are starting to hear about the Heritage Foundation and “Project 2025, and it’s not going over well with normal people as opposed the MAGA maniacs. So yesterday, someone post at Truth Social in Trumps name, claim to know nothing, nothing at all about Project 2025. (I know Trump didn’t actually write the post, because there were no misspellings or oddly capitalized words; and it included words like “abysmal.”
Donald Trump is trying to claim he has “nothing to do” with Project 2025, a political roadmap created by people close to him for his potential second term.
The project, which is led by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank, seeks to crack down on various issues including immigration, reproductive rights, environmental protections and LGBTQ+ rights. It also aims to replace federal employees with Trump loyalists across the government.
From the book “Tell us a story,” by Dolores McKay, 1923
Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social network: “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”
The former president’s post came a day after the Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, said the US was in the midst of a “second American revolution” that can be bloodless “if the left allows it to be”. He made the comments on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, adding that Republicans are “in the process of taking this country back”.
In response to Trump’s post, several critics were quick to point out that it appears unlikely that he is unaware of Project 2025, given that many individuals involved in the project are his closest allies.
“Many people involved in Project 2025 are close to Trump world & have served in his previous admin,” CNN’s Alayna Treene said.
“Project 2025” is nothing short of a 900-page blueprint for guiding Donald Trump’s second term of office if he’s re-elected.
After the Heritage Foundation unveiled Project 2025 in April last year, when Trump was seeking the Republican nomination, he had no problem with it.
But now that the nation is turning its attention to the general election, Trump doesn’t want Project 2025 to draw attention. Its extremism is likely to turn off independents and moderates.
So Trump is now claiming he has “no idea who is behind” Project 2025….
The Project 2025 playbook was written by more than 20 officials who Trump himself appointed during his first term. If he has “no idea” who they are, he’s showing an alarming cognitive decline.
One of the leaders of Project 2025 is Russ Vought. Vought was Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, a key position in the White House. Vought is also drafting Trump’s 2024 GOP platform.
Trump says he “knows nothing” about Project 2025. And he says he “disagrees” with it.
As the former chairman of the Republican party, Michael Steele put it, “Ok, let’s all play with Stupid for minute … so exactly how do you ‘disagree’ with something you ‘know nothing about’ or ‘have no idea’ who is behind, saying or doing the thing you disagree with?”
Artist unknown
Trump may also be worried that Heritage president Kevin Roberts could alarm independents and moderates. On Wednesday, Roberts raised the prospect of political violence. “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” Roberts told the War Room podcast, founded by Trump adviser Steve Bannon.
But let’s be clear. The Trump campaign platform is basically Project 2025. Trump’s Make America Great Again Pac is running ads calling it “Trump’s Project 2025”.
The Make America Great Again Pac also created the website TrumpProject2025.com. In case there’s any doubt that Trump and the Heritage Foundation are working in close partnership, Trump can be seen in this video praising the Heritage Foundation and saying he “needs” them to “achieve” his goals.
The close relationship between Trump and the Heritage Foundation goes back years. In 2018, the Heritage Foundation bragged that Trump implemented two-thirds of their policy recommendations in his first year – more than any other president had done for them.
The goals of Project 2025 are the same goals Trump tried to achieve in his first term or has been advocating in this campaign.
One key goal of Project 2025 is to purge all government agencies of anyone more loyal to the constitution than to Trump – a process Trump himself started in October 2020 when he thought he would remain in office.
Trump has promised to give rightwing evangelical Christians what they want. Accordingly, Project 2025 calls for withdrawing the abortion pill mifepristone from the market, expelling trans service members from the military, banning life-saving gender affirming care for young people, ending all diversity programs, and using “school choice” to gut public education.
Read the rest at The Guardian.
Trump is trying to use the SCOTUS “immunity” ruling to get rid of the espionage and other charges against him for stealing and hoarding secret government documents.
Donald Trump says the Supreme Court’s ruling that he has blanket immunity from prosecution for his “official acts” as president should result in a monthslong pause of his criminal proceedings in Florida.
The Friday filing by Trump’s legal team with U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon is the latest move by the former president to seize on the high court’s landmark immunity ruling to sideline his lingering criminal cases. He is asking Cannon for a chance to argue the immunity issue before her between now and early September, effectively pausing all other proceedings in the case by two months.
Trump has argued that his decision to transmit classified documents to his Florida home as he prepared to leave the presidency should be treated as an “official act” and be removed from special counsel Jack Smith’s case against Trump for allegedly hoarding national security secrets at his Mar-a-Lago estate. Now, he says, the Supreme Court’s ruling requires that the case be put on hold until the immunity issue is resolved.
The push by Trump is the latest effort to wield the Supreme Court’s decision as a weapon in his ongoing cases in Florida, Washington, D.C. and Georgia, each of which implicate some of Trump’s actions in his final months in the White House. The ruling has already scrambled plans for New York state judge Juan Merchan to sentence Trump on his 34-count conviction for concealing evidence of his alleged 2006 affair wiAlth porn star Stormy Daniels. Though that case centered on Trump’s private actions, some of the evidence prosecutors relied on overlapped with his first two years in the White House, which Trump contends should have been treated as off-limits.
““No Mortal Man is Above the Law,” sayeth the Supremes. Enjoy your Independence Day; if the Conflicted Convicted Felon is elected, it’ll be our last.” John Buss, Repeat 1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Independence Day has always been my favorite holiday, and it’s my youngest daughter’s too. When we lived in the Quarter, we would always walk our 2 blonde labs to the Mississippi River Bank and watch the left and east bank boats launch a huge fireworks display. Down here in the Bywater, it’s still the same short walk to the riverbank, but the Poland Avenue Wharf or the newest Crescent Park are the favorite places to go. Cars always turn to our local NPR station for patriotic music and blast it loud. You can tell when it’s time for the display because all the bars and houses empty into the streets and head south to the banks of the Mississippi River. I have always wondered what past celebrations were like, but that’s a rabbit hole for another day.
I spent the pre-show hours with friends listening to his industrial band livestream their efforts while sitting in their driveway patio. It seemed like a normal fourth. While everyone headed to the river, I headed home to Temple to let her dig a burrow under me to hide from the noise. No displays for me in the last 10 years. Just time at home in bed comforting Temple. The weird thing this year was the fireworks didn’t seem to bother her, and she spent most of the time spooning me. Maybe she sensed that my fear was far greater than hers today. It’s a thought.
Twilight’s last gleaming from last night at my neighbor’s driveway patio.
The swiftboating of the democratic candidate season has begun. My friend who owns the bar on the corner told me she’s hearing from others besides me who are looking for places to become expats. Given the Le Pen elections, I’m researching the south of France right now, although they may soon have their counter-revolution. Russia is happy about that one. I’m sure they have high hopes for us.
If you haven’t seen this little speech, you really should. “Leader of the pro-Trump Project 2025 suggests there will be a new American Revolution. Kevin Roberts said the revolution will be bloodless “if the left allows it to be.” This is from the AP but sourced at Politico.
The leader of a conservative think tank orchestrating plans for a massive overhaul of the federal government in the event of a Republican presidential win said that the country is in the midst of a “second American Revolution” that will be bloodless “if the left allows it to be.”
Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts made the comments Tuesday on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, adding that Republicans are “in the process of taking this country back.”
Democrats are “apoplectic right now” because the right is winning, Roberts told former U.S. Rep. Dave Brat, one of the podcast’s guest hosts as Bannon is serving a four-month prison term. “And so I come full circle on this response and just want to encourage you with some substance that we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
Roberts’ remarks shed light on how a group that promises to have significant influence over a possible second term for former President Donald Trump is thinking about this moment in American politics. The Heritage Foundation is spearheading Project 2025, a sweeping road map for a new GOP administration that includes plans for dismantling aspects of the federal government and ousting thousands of civil servants in favor of Trump loyalists who will carry out a hard-right agenda without complaint.
His call for revolution and vague reference to violence also unnerved some Democrats who interpreted it as threatening.
“This is chilling,” former Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson wrote on the social platform X. “Their idea of a second American Revolution is to undo the first one.”
James Singer, a spokesperson for President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign, pointed to this week’s Fourth of July holiday in an emailed statement.
“248 years ago tomorrow America declared independence from a tyrannical king, and now Donald Trump and his allies want to make him one at our expense,” Singer said, adding that Trump and his allies are ”dreaming of a violent revolution to destroy the very idea of America.”
Roberts, whose name Bannon recently floated to The New York Times as a potential chief of staff option for Trump, also said on the podcast that Republicans should be encouraged by the Supreme Court’s recent immunity ruling.
Bannon is in jail right now, serving time for contempt of Congress. The New Republic‘s Parker Malloy has a good point here. “Why Does the Media Insist on Helping Steve Bannon Act the Martyr? NBC and ABC snagged pre-prison interviews with the far-right globalist. But to what end? They became tools in his propaganda machine.” The press just falls right in line by normalizing this behavior.
NBC News’s Vaughn Hillyard and ABC News’s Jonathan Karl recently made a journalistic misstep by interviewing Steve Bannon right before he reported to prison. This move, which might seem innocuous at first glance, actually elevates Bannon’s “political prisoner” narrative, a misleading storyline that does little but bolster the War Room host’s victim complex.
By interviewing Bannon just before he heads to prison, both NBC and ABC are essentially giving him a platform to paint himself as a martyr.
It allows Bannon to control the narrative. This plays directly into the hands of Bannon and his supporters, who are eager to cast any legal action against them as part of a broader conspiracy to silence dissent. It’s a classic tactic: position yourself as a victim to garner sympathy and rally support.
But Bannon is not going to prison for his political beliefs or his support for Donald Trump. He’s going to prison because he defied a congressional subpoena. By allowing Bannon to put some focus on his claims of political persecution, these interviews shift attention away from his actual misconduct and the legal consequences of that misconduct. This undermines the rule of law and gives credence to the idea that powerful individuals can evade accountability by crying foul.
Beyond that, it normalizes extremist rhetoric. In his interview with Karl, Bannon doubled down on his inflammatory language, discussing “retribution” and the need for investigations and potential imprisonments of political figures. Bannon listed former FBI Director James Comey, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, former Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and former Attorney General Bill Barr as people who should be “very worried” about prosecution under a second Trump administration. Bannon defended his use of the slogan “Victory or Death!” at the recent Turning Point Action convention and rolled his eyes at Karl for even asking him about his 2020 comments about beheading Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray.
Mark Robinson, the extremist GOP nominee for governor in North Carolina, appeared to endorse political violence in a bizarre and extended rant he delivered on June 30 in a small-town church.
“Some folks need killing!” Robinson, the state’s lieutenant governor, shouted during a roughly half-hour-long speech in Lake Church in the tiny town of White Lake, in the southeast corner of the state. “It’s time for somebody to say it. It’s not a matter of vengeance. It’s not a matter of being mean or spiteful. It’s a matter of necessity!”
Robinson’s call for the “killing” of “some folks” came during an extended diatribe in which he attacked an extraordinary assortment of enemies. These ranged from “people who have evil intent” to “wicked people” to those doing things like “torturing and murdering and raping” to socialists and Communists. He also invoked those supposedly undermining America’s founding ideals and leftists allegedly persecuting conservatives by canceling them and doxxing them online.
In all this, Robinson appeared to endorse lethal violence against these unnamed enemies, particularly on the left, though he wasn’t exactly clear on which “folks” are the ones who “need killing.”
Robinson, a self-described “MAGA Republican,” has a long history of wildly radical and unhinged moments. He has linked homosexuality to pedophilia, called for the arrest of trans women, pushed hallucinogenic antisemitic conspiracy theories, endorsed the vile “birther” conspiracy about Barack Obama, described Michelle Obama as a man, hinted at the need to violently oppose federal law enforcement and the government, and posted memes mocking and denying the brutal, violent assault on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, among many other things.
President Joe Biden will hold a rally Friday in Wisconsin and then sit for his first televised interview since his disastrous debate performance last week, events could be crucial in determining whether he can salvage his embattled candidacy.
The interview with anchor George Stephanopoulos of ABC News is shaping up to be one of the most high-stakes moments for a president or a candidate in many years. Democratic elected officials, donors and voters will be closely watching to see whether he can still deliver in an adversarial setting and turn in a performance worthy of being the party’s nominee to defeat Donald Trump this fall.
The interview will “air in its entirety as a primetime special” at 8 p.m. ET Friday, ABC said, adding that a “transcript of the unedited interview will be made available the same day.”
Before that, Biden is expected to speak this afternoon at a campaign rally in Madison, Wisconsin. At the rally, Biden will “underscore the stakes of this election for our democracy, our rights and freedoms, and our economy,” a campaign official said. Also speaking will be Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, and Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., among others.
The White House said the interview team from ABC “will be with us all day in Wisconsin” and able to cover the rally event and to observe the president as he participates in his schedule, and said it has “some flexibility” around the length of the sit-down but “no exact estimate” of the duration of the conversation.
Read the next paragraph, which I will not print here, and try not to bang your head against your desk, wall, or coffee table. Law Professor Richard W. Painter is floating a Constitutional Amendment on X.
Const. Amend. 28: “The President and the judges of the United States courts including the Supreme Court, shall be bound by the criminal laws of the United States and also by financial disclosure and conflict of interest laws enacted by Congress.” So who votes against?
So, I have to share this one from the New York Times even though I’m about to cancel my subscription. “Biden Tells Governors He Needs More Sleep and Less Work at Night. The president’s opening remark to a group of key Democratic leaders — that he was in the race to stay — chilled any talk of his withdrawal, participants said.” The usual suspects, Reid J. Epstein and Maggie Haberman, reported it.
President Biden told a gathering of Democratic governors that he needs to get more sleep and work fewer hours, including curtailing events after 8 p.m., according to two people who participated in the meeting and several others briefed on his comments.
The remarks on Wednesday were a stark acknowledgment of fatigue from the 81-year-old president during a meeting intended to reassure more than two dozen of his most important supporters that he is still in command of his job and capable of mounting a robust campaign against former President Donald J. Trump.
But Mr. Biden told the governors, some of whom were at the White House while others participated virtually, that he was staying in the race.
He described his extensive foreign travel in the weeks before the debate, something that the White House and his allies have in recent days cited as the reason for his halting performance during the debate. Initially, Mr. Biden’s campaign blamed a cold, putting out word about midway through the debate amid a series of social media posts questioning why Mr. Biden was struggling.
Mr. Biden said that he told his staff he needed to get more sleep, multiple people familiar with what took place in the meeting said. He repeatedly referenced pushing too hard and not listening to his team about his schedule, and said he needed to work fewer hours and avoid events scheduled after 8 p.m., according to one of the people familiar with what took place at the meeting.
After Gov. Josh Green of Hawaii, a physician, asked Mr. Biden questions about the status of his health, Mr. Biden replied that his health was fine. “It’s just my brain,” he added, according to three people familiar with what took place — a remark that some in the room took as a joke, including Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York, according to a person close to her. But at least one governor did not, and was puzzled by it.
Jen O’Malley Dillon, Mr. Biden’s campaign chair, who attended the meeting, said in a statement that he had said, “All kidding aside,” a recollection confirmed by another person briefed on the meeting. Ms. O’Malley Dillon added: “He was clearly making a joke.”
So, I fully admit to being depressed and worried. I know that BB stopped her NYT subscription. I hope John Buss doesn’t mind. I shared this bit he posted to his FaceBook about canceling his. I seriously worry about him in North Carolina, too. None of us in the old Confederate States are safe right now.
This is from a poll taken in April and reported by the AP on May 1. “Half of US adults mistrust media coverage of 2024 elections, a poll finds. About half of Americans say they are extremely or very concerned that news organizations will report inaccuracies or misinformation during the election. According to a poll, 42% express worry that news outlets will use generative artificial intelligence to create stories. (AP Video: Serkan Gurbuz)”
I think it’s likely that if they redid that this month, they’d find a statistically significant increase in the number of people saying that. However, I admit that I live in the Southern City that promptly surrendered when Captain David Farragut of the Union Navy bombed two forts and arrived at the port. We are a haven for the GLBT community. We also have a strong Jewish presence and are well known for being a place of refuge for many diasporas. Our new governor hates us and wants to take away our city charter, which is the legal means by which we don’t become the rest of the state. You have to wonder how many cities like ours will come under direct attack if MAGA either gets its way or doesn’t.
The only way out of this is to VOTE and get everyone you know to VOTE because our lives depend on it.
I really hope you got to enjoy a little celebration on Independence Day. I’m still on board with ensuring liberty and justice for all. I am also standing by the Biden/Harris ticket. Again, you realize that I have had a lot of gripes in the past about Biden and what happened to Anita Hill. It is somewhat karmic that what is going on now is somewhat built in by the bad decision he, Teddy Kennedy, and John Kerry made about Clarence Thomas. Forty-eight percent of the Senate was against his confirmation. He should’ve been Borked. That, unfortunately, is toxic water under the bridge of democracy, but we have what we have now, and it is what it is. Remember the words of Benjamin Franklin and fight for it. The Roberts Supreme Court just took down the republic.
“A republic, if you can keep it.”
–Benjamin Franklin’s response to Elizabeth Willing Powel’s question: “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
I’m sentimental, if you know what I mean I love the country but I can’t stand the scene And I’m neither left or right I’m just staying home tonight Getting lost in that hopeless little screen But I’m stubborn as those garbage bags That time cannot decay I’m junk but I’m still holding up This little wild bouquet Democracy is coming to the U.S.A
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I don’t know how much I can post today. I’m exhausted and overwhelmed by the events of the past week or so. How much worse can things get in this country? As Democrats, we are dealing with assaults from the corrupt Supreme Court as well as MAGA Republicans, the media pundit class, and cowardly members of our own party. Biden had a bad debate, yes; but so did Trump. He did nothing but spew lies. He didn’t address one policy issue, because he is too stupid and lazy to even understand policy. But all we hear from the DC pundits is that Biden should step down.
Folks, the way we choose presidents since 1972 is through primaries, and Joe Biden won all the primaries. He holds most of the delegates. His campaign has collected millions in donations that can’t be transferred to another candidate. It’s possible the money could go to Kamala Harris, but the DC/NY pundits don’t want her.
Biden is on the ballot in many states; if another candidate runs in his place, voters would have to write in his/her name. With four months left before the election, there just isn’t time for a new candidate to raise money, hire staff, set up campaign offices around the country, and become known to low information voters. That candidate would also have to deal with the anger and resentment of people who voted for Biden/Harris–especially the African American and women voters who are essential to Democrats winning elections.
Finally, an open convention–which some pundits are calling for–would be an insane shit show that would tear the party apart. Push for this if you really want King Trump in the White House–this time with no guardrails from so-called adults in the room.
If you want more details on why replacing our nominee would be a horrible idea, here is a long Twitter thread by Dana Houle that spells out the challenges that would be faced by a candidate who replaced Biden. WordPress won’t let me post the tweets, but I’ll copy some of them here.
1/ Democrats cannot nominate anyone except Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. It’s impossible. If the Biden candidacy ends, so does the Biden campaign. It’s not transferable. Anyone else other than possibly Kamala Harris would have to start from nothing. That’s can’t be done.
2/It’s possible I’m missing something, but I don’t think so. Here’s why the Democrats can nominate Joe Biden, or possibly Kamala Harris, but nobody else. There’s only one candidate with a 2024 presidential campaign committee registered with the Federal Election Commission.
3/Some of the “stuff” of the Biden campaign can probably be transferred to the DNC (and maybe state parties), but most of it can’t. Another candidate can’t just take over Biden’s campaign. So, think about it. A new nominee would not have a campaign. Like, not a tax ID…
4/Not a bank account, not a website or address. There would be nothing. They would start out largely paralyzed for weeks. First and most obviously, there would be no staff. And there would be no HR process for hiring staff, no payroll process. So a new campaign trying to…
5/…rapidly expand would have to focus on staffing. They could probably hire people from the Biden campaign, but not all would want to work for the new candidate. Among the first people needed would be compliance and legal staff, because a new campaign would be immediately…
6/…challenged on ballot access and all kinds of other stuff. Compliance would be needed to deal with the massive influx of immediate cash and to be sure everything meets FEC rules. But to get cash they’d need banking/accounting as well. So that needs to be set up…
7/And since most of the money would come in online, they’d need to immediately set up a web operation robust enough to handle to load, and secure enough to handle the obvious cyberattacks that would happen. So they’d need contracts for servers, support staff, etc…
8/This new campaign would also be immediately inundated with calls and emails from press, potential volunteers and donors, other campaigns/party orgs, orgs inviting the candidate to events, etc.. So they would immediately need staff for press, scheduling, political, etc
9/Some of these people could probably slide over from the DNC or state parties. But that leaves holes at the DNC and state parties. But let’s say they could immediately staff up. Where does everyone work? Office leases prob can’t be automatically transferred to the…
10/…new campaign, so all of those would need to be renegotiated, and some may not be available to the new campaign. They’d also have to deal with utilities. Then, how does everyone communicate? As we know from 2016, security breeches can be fatal. So it’s not something…
11/…that can be tossed together in a day or so. But let’s say all the staff and infrastructure can be conjured from the ether. What about the data? Some could probably be transferred, but some of the lists would probably need to be purchased at fair market value from…
12/…Biden/Harris 2024. The new campaign would be starting out with no email lists, no volunteer lists, no fundraising lists, etc. They’d also be starting with no contracts with vendors. All those contracts would have to be negotiated
There is much more to this thread. I recommend reading it if you’re thinking Biden should step down or you want to inform other people who think that.
The New York Times editorial board and seemingly every columnist at the paper called on Biden to withdraw from the race in pieces with headlines like, “President Biden, I’ve seen enough.” So did the Chicago Tribune editorial board and New Yorker editor David Remnick. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, co-host of Biden’s favorite morning show, urged the president to at last consider stepping aside. And Pod Save America’s response to the debate was so apoplectic that it prompted the Biden campaign to take a shot at “self-important Podcasters.”
The Sea, by Frederick Childe Hassam
The feeding frenzy/panic is to some extent understandable and inevitable. Biden wanted the debate early in order to put to rest fears about his age and to end the conversation about whether he would drop off the ticket. Instead, he sounded confused, and his lifelong stutter was more prominent than it ever has been in his decades-long career. Media figures licking their chops about the incendiary conflicts and clicks of a contested convention started to salivate a river. Democrats nervous about Biden’s ability to wage a forceful campaign became outright fearful.
But amidst all the tearing of garments and vultures circling, the fact is that we’re still pretty much where we were pre-debate. There are two questions: Is Biden fit to serve? And, would Democrats benefit by forcing him off the ticket? The answers remain “he is” and “probably not.”
There’s little evidence Biden is actually in mental decline.
The debate about Biden’s debate performance has largely focused on his appearance, suggesting he’s unelectable and finessing the question of whether he’s actually unfit. Some outlets, though, openly asserted that Biden is in cognitive decline, arguing that laypeople watching a debate can instantly assess someone’s mental fitness.
The Chicago Tribune, for example, argued Biden “should announce that he will be a single-term president who now has seen the light when it comes to his own capabilities in the face of the singular demands of being the president of the United States.” They added, “Everyone sees that now.”
But you can’t actually just “see” whether someone is in cognitive decline. Yes, people are often convinced that signs of physical illness or hesitation reflect mental hesitation; that’s why there’s so much prejudice against stutterers. But editorial boards and people with a public platform have a responsibility to inform readers, not just mirror popular prejudices.
What we know about aging, and about Biden, has not changed since the debate. In May, the Washington Post consulted with experts about the aging process and how likely aging is to affect the decision-making abilities of Biden and Republican challenger Donald Trump, who’s no spring chicken himself.
Those experts uniformly “rejected any suggestion that there should be an upper age limit for the presidency.” They also argued that there were many advantages to older candidates, who were likely to have better judgement and more emotional stability. According to Earl Miller, a professor of neuroscience at MIT, “Knowledge and experience count for a lot, and that can more than make up for slight losses of memory as a result of aging.”
Experts also pointed out that articulation problems, mixing up words, or using the wrong word were common problems as people aged, but none of them indicate cognitive decline overall. Stutters can also worsen and improve sporadically over a lifetime, but that doesn’t mean someone is impaired.
Also, again, experts insist that you can’t diagnose cognitive decline by watching TV clips, or even by watching a debate.
Following Biden’s poor debate performance against Donald Trump, we’re releasing the full and unedited 21-minute interview we conducted with President Joe Biden nine days before his interview with Special Counsel Robert K. Hur.
In the wake of President Joe Biden’s poor debate performance, his opponents and most major media organizations have pointed out that he has done few interviews that give the public an opportunity to hear him speak without a script or teleprompters.
ProPublica obtained a rare interview with Biden on Sept. 29, nine days before the Hur interviews began. We released the video, which was assembled from footage shot by five cameras, on Oct. 1. We edited out less than a minute of crosstalk and exchanges with the camera people, as is customary in such interviews.
Today, we are releasing the full, 21-minute interview, unedited as seen from the view of the single camera focused on Biden. We understand that this video captures a moment in time nine months ago and that it will not settle the ongoing arguments about the president’s acuity today. Still, we believe it is worth giving the public another chance to see one of Biden’s infrequent conversations with a reporter.
Conducting the interview was veteran journalist and former CNN White House correspondent John Harwood, who requested it and then worked with ProPublica to film and produce it.
He did not send questions to the White House ahead of time, nor did he get approval for the topics to be discussed during the interview.
Recording began as soon as Biden was miked and sitting in the chair that Friday at 2:50 p.m. Earlier that day, Biden’s press staff had said the president would have only 10 minutes for the interview, instead of the previously agreed upon 20 minutes. We requested that the interview go the full 20 minutes. You can hear during the unedited interview a couple of moments when White House staff interrupted to signal that the interview should come to a close. Biden seemed eager to continue talking.
Read and watch the interview at ProPublica.
What’s truly amazing to me is that the media is focused on getting rid of Biden instead of the recent decision by the corrupt Supreme Court that granted king-like powers to Trump if he is elected. The media is doing to Biden what they did to Hillary Clinton and Al Gore–focusing on minutia and in doing so, supporting a dangerous candidate who will do untold damage to the country. George W. Bush was bad enough; a Trump presidency would mean the end of our democracy. He would pull us out of NATO and ally the U.S. with Russia, China, Hungary, Turkey, and North Korea. He has announced his plan to deport millions of immigrants, who will be put in camps until he can figure out how to get rid of them. Is that what we want? I know I don’t.
Last week, finding himself furious at the court’s per curiamdecision to hold off on deciding a big abortion case about the kinds of miscarriage care states may withhold from pregnant women in emergency rooms, Justice Samuel Alito excoriated his colleagues for punting. In his view, as he put it—in an opinion joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch—the court’s “about-face” on taking, then running away from, the EMTALA abortion case was “baffling” because “nothing legally relevant has occurred” since the court granted an emergency stay in January and plonked itself into a dispute before it went through the appeals process. It was an easy case, he sniffed. Many amicus briefs had been filed, he huffed. Why had the court balked at the last minute? Thinking. Thinking. Then: “Apparently,” he hypothesized, “the Court has simply lost the will to decide the easy but emotional and highly politicized question that the case presents.”
That’s right. The majority of the court (and all of its females) found the issue too “emotional” to do the hard work of denying women in acute medical emergencies abortion care.
Fairfield Porter, On the Porch, 1961
Had he given his word choice 10 seconds’ further thought (or even conferred with his wife, who is by all accounts “fond of flags”), Alito might have taken out that “emotional” crack before attacking Amy Coney Barrett’s defection in this matter, in the time between the accidental release of the draft decision and its final publication the next day. He did not.
It’s gross, but not unexpected, that often when the court fractures along gender lines, as it has frequently this term, you will hear a whole lot of the jovial “Calm down, little missy” talk that you might recall from 1950s sitcoms.
Last week, finding himself furious at the court’s per curiamdecision to hold off on deciding a big abortion case about the kinds of miscarriage care states may withhold from pregnant women in emergency rooms, Justice Samuel Alito excoriated his colleagues for punting. In his view, as he put it—in an opinion joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch—the court’s “about-face” on taking, then running away from, the EMTALA abortion case was “baffling” because “nothing legally relevant has occurred” since the court granted an emergency stay in January and plonked itself into a dispute before it went through the appeals process. It was an easy case, he sniffed. Many amicus briefs had been filed, he huffed. Why had the court balked at the last minute? Thinking. Thinking. Then: “Apparently,” he hypothesized, “the Court has simply lost the will to decide the easy but emotional and highly politicized question that the case presents.”minal law.’ ”
“Our dissenting colleagues exude an impressive infallibility,” writes Roberts, like a girls soccer coach. “While their confidence may be inspiring, the Court adheres to time-tested practices instead—deciding what is required to dispose of this case.” Hate the player, change the game.
In brushing past the district court opinion written by Judge Tanya Chutkan and the thorough, 57-page appellate opinion joined by Judges Karen LeCraft Henderson, Florence Pan, and J. Michelle Childs, the chief justice manages to malign their work product too: “Despite the unprecedented nature of this case, and the very significant constitutional questions that it raises, the lower courts rendered their decisions on a highly expedited basis.” Shorter Roberts? Really hard to find good help these days.
On CNN, Donald Trump’s former White House counsel Ty Cobb coughed up the same critique of Sotomayor. “Her dissent was a little hysterical, and it really offered no analysis,” he said. “A lot of screaming, no analysis. And I think that was unfortunate.”
Screaming. Insubstantial. Hysterical. What men call banshees, women call prophecy. And of course if there are any sitting justices on the Roberts court whose entire jurisprudence can be reduced to a soggy skein of hurt feelings and self-pity, they are not females.
We women thought we had made progress, but it’s not looking that way these days. There’s quite a bit more to read at Slate. Lithwick has reached the end of her patience. Here’s what she wrote on Twitter on Monday evening:
As an official representative of the legal commentariat I want to suggest that tonight’s a good news cycle to talk to the fascism and authoritarianism experts. This is their inning now…
Forget Donald Trump. Forget Joe Biden. Think instead about the Constitution. What does this document, the supreme law of our land, actually say about lawsuits against ex-presidents?
Nothing remotely resembling what Chief Justice John Roberts and five associate justices declared in yesterday’s disappointing Trump v. United States decision. The Court’s curious and convoluted majority opinion turns the Constitution’s text and structure inside out and upside down, saying things that are flatly contradicted by the document’s unambiguous letter and obvious spirit.
Imagine a simple hypothetical designed to highlight the key constitutional clauses that should have been the Court’s starting point: In the year 2050, when Trump and Biden are presumably long gone, David Dealer commits serious drug crimes and then bribes President Jane Jones to pardon him.
Is Jones acting as president, in her official capacity, when she pardons Dealer? Of course. She is pardoning qua president. No one else can issue such a pardon. The Constitution expressly vests this power in the president: “The President … shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States.”
Wind from the Sea, by Andrew Wyeth
But the Constitution also contains express language that a president who takes a bribe can be impeached for bribery and then booted from office: “The President … shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other High Crimes and Misdemeanors.” And once our hypothetical President Jones has been thus removed and is now ex-President Jones, the Constitution’s plain text says that she is subject to ordinary criminal prosecution, just like anyone else: “In cases of Impeachment … the Party convicted shall … be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.”
Obviously, in Jones’s impeachment trial in the Senate, all sorts of evidence is admissible to prove not just that she issued the pardon but also why she did this—to prove that she had an unconstitutional motive, to prove that she pardoned Dealer because she was bribed to do so. Just as obviously, in the ensuing criminal case, all of this evidence surely must be allowed to come in.
But the Trump majority opinion, written by Roberts, says otherwise, proclaiming that “courts may not inquire into the President’s motives.” In a later footnote all about bribery, the Roberts opinion says that criminal-trial courts are not allowed to “admit testimony or private records of the President or his advisers probing the official act itself. Allowing that sort of evidence would invite the jury to inspect the President’s motivations for his official actions and to second-guess their propriety.”
But such an inspection is exactly what the Constitution itself plainly calls for. An impeachment court and, later, a criminal court would have to determine whether Jones pardoned Dealer because she thought he was innocent, or because she thought he had already suffered enough, or because he put money in her pocket for the very purpose of procuring the pardon. The smoking gun may well be in Jones’s diary—her “private records”—or in a recorded Oval Office conversation with Jones’s “advisers,” as was the case in the Watergate scandal. Essentially, the Court in Trump v. United States is declaring the Constitution itself unconstitutional. Instead of properly starting with the Constitution’s text and structure, the Court has ended up repealing them.
There’s more at the link, but I’ve given you the gist.
In her dissent to Monday’s Supreme Court ruling, Justice Sonia Sotomayor painted a grim portrait of a commander-in-chief now “immune, immune, immune” from criminal liability and free to exploit official presidential power against political opponents.
“Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival?” she wrote. “Immune.”
As extraordinary as that prospect might sound, constitutional law experts say she’s right: The court’s decision in Trump v. United States really does appear to immunize a hypothetical president who directed the military to commit murder, though a president might be hard-pressed to find someone to carry out such an order
Young woman relaxing, by Francesco Masriera
The crux of the issue, legal scholars said, is that the decision granted total immunity for any actions a president takes using the “core powers” that the Constitution bestows on the office. One such power is the authority to command the military.
“The language of the Supreme Court’s decision seems to suggest that because this is a core function of the president, that there is absolute immunity from criminal prosecution,” said Cheryl Bader, a criminal law professor at Fordham Law School and a former federal prosecutor. “If Trump, as commander in chief, ordered his troops to assassinate somebody or stage a coup, that would seem to fall within the absolute immunity provision of the court’s decision.”
The hypothetical about a president deploying the Navy SEALs to assassinate a political opponent has come up before — including during a lower-court hearing on Trump’s immunity litigation and during the Supreme Court’s own oral arguments in the case. It was raised as an absurdity to illustrate that the most sweeping version of Trump’s immunity theory could not possibly be right. In fact, when Justice Samuel Alito broached the scenario during oral arguments, he drew laughter in the courtroom.
So the fact that Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion on Monday did not attempt to directly carve out such extreme examples immediately raised alarm among some experts. Roberts’ opinion appeared to address the matter only obliquely.
Is it possible that Roberts doesn’t understand that Trump wants to use violence? I have no doubt that is if he is elected, he will order the military to fire live rounds at protesters.
KEVIN ROBERTS (HERITAGE FOUNDATION PRESIDENT): In spite of all this nonsense from the left, we are going to win. We’re in the process of taking this country back. No one in the audience should be despairing.
No one should be discouraged. We ought to be really encouraged by what happened yesterday. And in spite of all of the injustice, which, of course, friends and audience of this show, of our friend Steve know, we are going to prevail.
Number two, to the point of the clips and, of course, your preview of the fact that I am an early American historian and love the Constitution. That Supreme Court ruling yesterday on immunity is vital, and it’s vital for a lot of reasons. But I would go to Federalist No. 70.
If people in the audience are looking for something to read over Independence Day weekend, in addition to rereading the Declaration of Independence, read Hamilton’s No. 70 because there, along with some other essays, in some other essays, he talks about the importance of a vigorous executive.
You know, former congressman, the importance of Congress doing its job, but we also know the importance of the executive being able to do his job. And can you imagine, Dave Brat, any president, put politics off to the side, any president having to second guess, triple guess every decision they’re making in their official capacity, you couldn’t have the republic that you just described.
But number three, let me speak about the radical left. You and I have both been parts of faculties and faculty senates and understand that the left has taken over our institutions. The reason that they are apoplectic right now, the reason that so many anchors on MSNBC, for example, are losing their minds daily is because our side is winning.
And so I come full circle on this response and just want to encourage you with some substance that we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.
That’s all I have for you today. I’ve included some relaxing paintings to counteract the horror.
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
The French are also celebrating in the streets. I discussed the results with my exchange High School French Teacher, who also taught in Southeast Asia and was in Vietnam with his now wife when Saigon fell. They presently run a Vietnamese restaurant in Nice. He expressed relief. This report is by CNN’s Christian Edwards. “What happened in France’s shock election, and what comes next?”
Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen of Axios focus on “Behind the Curtain: Trump’s dream regime.”
Instead of continually polling about Biden’s age and debate performance, why don’t they poll on Project 2025? Frankly, if I were up there on the campaign staff right now, I’d actually be pushing polling on it. Donald is aware of how much of the language plays with mainstream America. This Washington Post article by Michael Scherer and Josh Dawsey makes me wonder what the result could be. “Trump proposes scaled-back platform that softens language on abortion, same-sex marriage. The draft was circulated Monday among members of the 2024 Republican convention platform committee. It will be discussed and voted on later this week.”
It’s a good thing most voters ignore a Party’s platform because this one now has weasel wording. Weasel wording is basically the tool of the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court, too. This is from Vox and is written by Ian Millhiser. “The Supreme Incompetents. The justices are awful at their jobs, and they don’t know that they are awful at their jobs.”
Trump has argued that his decision to transmit classified documents to his Florida home as he prepared to leave the presidency should be treated as an “official act” and be removed from special counsel Jack Smith’s case against Trump for allegedly hoarding national security secrets at his Mar-a-Lago estate. Now, he says, the Supreme Court’s ruling requires that the case be put on hold until the immunity issue is resolved.
Bannon is in jail right now, serving time for contempt of Congress. The New Republic‘s Parker Malloy has a good point here. “Why Does the Media Insist on Helping Steve Bannon Act the Martyr? NBC and ABC snagged pre-prison interviews with the far-right globalist. But to what end? They became tools in his propaganda machine.” The press just falls right in line by normalizing this behavior.
Also, from TNR is this headline about the black man running for governor on the insanity platform. “MAGA Gov Candidate’s Ugly, Hateful Rant: “Some Folks Need Killing!” Mark Robinson, the GOP nominee for governor in North Carolina, has a long history of incendiary comments. But he may have topped himself this time.” 
If you want a real shock, go see The Economist Cover Picture today with the heading “No way to Run a Country.” The attached story is “Biden Must Withdraw.” This is from a country where the General Election just kicked the Conservative PM (a hedge fund manager) and replaced him with a Human Rights Lawyer and member of the Labour Party. Fourteen years of Conservative Rule has just been tossed for something different. Of course, CNN has joined the swiftboating effort. This is from Dr. Sanjay Gupta at CNN. “It’s time for President Biden to undergo detailed cognitive and neurological testing and share his results.”
So, I fully admit to being depressed and worried. I know that BB stopped her NYT subscription. I hope John Buss doesn’t mind. I shared this bit he posted to his FaceBook about canceling his. I seriously worry about him in North Carolina, too. None of us in the old Confederate States are safe right now.
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