Here in New Orleans, we had a Big Bubble Protest because of some rich guy that moved to the Quarter last year and has filed no less than 15 Criminal complaints over a bubble machine on the balcony of a restaurant that’s been there for over ten years. He thinks that the bubbles will ruin his Porsche and poison his drink when he imbibes on his balcony. This is the typical New Orleans gentrifier. He comes from someplace and expects New Orleans to accommodate his burbie weirdness. Just another old rich white guy trying to rule the world.
Meanwhile, Trump was posting madly early in the morning about every big music star that ever rejected him. That’s right before he’s supposed to be meeting with Putin and Zelensky over Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Joe Biden has cancer, and Junior’s been hitting Truth Social and drugs at the same time.
All I can do is quote Chief Meteorologist Emeritus for Channel 2 Action News’ Severe Weather Team 2. AMS certified Glenn Burns. He was talking about the Polar Vortex, but it applies to everything these days. “Nothing is like it used to be anymore.”
You can go read about the selfies of Trump with the Waffle House Toilet guys for yourself. Yes, it’s up there on the Daily Mail.
No wonder the Polar Vortex doesn’t want to be near the United States anymore. Who would?
There are a lot of improvements we need in this country, but none of this stands as necessary or wanted. I love this float pic but think Senator Duckworth’s label Cadet Bone Spurs is more appropriate since Yam Tits would have never made it to a rank of sargent. But, yes, we’re getting a big, beautiful parade. It’s going to cost millions. This rather makes it official. We’re a damn Banana Republic. But the best thing is that pissed-off Americans are once more taking to the streets with placards and protests. This is from lawyermonthly. ““No Kings Day” Protests Set to Disrupt Trump’s $45M Birthday Military Parade.”
On June 14, a date that commemorates both the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army and the 79th birthday of former President Donald J. Trump, the streets of the nation’s capital are expected to swell, not only with tanks, soldiers, and fighter jets, but with thousands of protestors prepared to send a very different message.
In a show of political theater unprecedented in recent years, Trump and his allies are staging what they’ve dubbed a “patriotic celebration,” complete with more than 6,000 uniformed troops, 150 military vehicles, and a dramatic aerial flyover.
The event, organizers say, is intended to honor America’s armed forces. Critics, however, see something more troubling: a public spectacle designed to cement the image of Trump as commander-in-chief, long after leaving office.
But while the parade commands the headlines, another force is quietly gaining momentum and it’s aiming to steal the spotlight.
Born from frustration and sharpened by years of political tension, a broad coalition of advocacy groups is organizing a massive counter-movement under the banner “No Kings Day.”
It’s not just a protest, they say. It’s a rejection of the authoritarian imagery they believe the parade represents.
Organizers from groups including the 50501 Movement and Refuse Fascism say they’re mobilizing demonstrations in over 100 cities nationwide, with Washington, D.C. serving as the focal point.
Estimates suggest between 10,000 to 20,000 demonstrators will gather in Meridian Hill Park before marching toward the National Mall.
“It’s not about hating Trump, it’s about preserving democracy,” said Angela V., a volunteer coordinator in Maryland who’s helping coordinate buses into the city. “We can’t normalize tanks in the streets every time a former president wants a birthday party.”
Though the name “No Kings Day” may sound theatrical, the intentions behind it are serious.
Protestors plan to highlight what they see as Trump’s attempts to centralize power and glamorize military dominance, particularly during a time when the former president faces multiple indictments related to election interference, classified documents, and alleged abuse of power.
How about we use that $45 million plus whatever it costs to undo the damage Washington D.C. roads to fund the Veterans’ services cut by that ugly budget winding its way to the Senate today? Economist Paul Krugman–writing at his substack–colorfully describes the budget process as “Attack of the Sadistic Zombies. The GOP budget is incredibly cruel — and that’s the point.” Sounds a lot like the guy who doesn’t want bubbles in his drink or on his Porsche.
Republicans in Congress, taking their marching orders from Donald Trump, are on track to enact a hugely regressive budget — big tax giveaways to the wealthy combined with cruel cuts in programs that serve lower-income Americans. True, the legislation suffered a setback last week, initially failing to make it out of committee. But that was largely because some right-wing Republicans didn’t think the benefit cuts were vicious enough.
OK, news at 11. Isn’t this what Republicans always do? But this reconciliation bill — that is, legislation structured in such a way that it can’t be filibustered and may well pass with no Democratic votes — is different in both degree and kind from what we’ve seen before: Its cruelty is exceptional even by recent right-wing standards. Furthermore, the way that cruelty will be implemented is notable for its reliance on claims we know aren’t true and policies we know won’t work — what some of us call zombie ideas.
And it’s hard to avoid the sense that the counterproductive viciousness is actually the point. Think of what we’re seeing as the attack of the sadistic zombies.
To get a sense of how extreme this legislation is, do a side-by-side comparison of the impact on different groups of Americans between this bill and Trump’s one major legislative achievement during his first term, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. It looks like this:
Source: Tax Policy Center and Penn-Wharton Budget Model
The TCJA, like the current legislation, gave big tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans. But it also threw a few crumbs to people further down the scale. By contrast, the House Reconciliation Bill, by slashing benefits — especially Medicaid — will cause immense, almost inconceivable hardship to the bottom 40 percent of Americans, especially the poorest fifth.
Medicaid, in case anyone needs reminding, is the national health insurance program for low-income Americans who probably don’t have any other way to pay for medical care. In 2023 Medicaid covered 69 million Americans, far more than Medicare (which covers seniors), including 39 percent of children.
Providing health care to children, by the way, isn’t just about social justice and basic decency. It’s also good economics: Children who receive adequate care grow up to be more productive adults. Among other things they end up paying more taxes, so Medicaid for children almost surely pays for itself.
And although Republican legislation apparently won’t explicitly target childrens’ care, it will impose paperwork requirements that will cause both children and their parents to lose coverage.
Tonight, late on a Sunday night, the House Budget Committee passed what Republicans are calling their “Big, Beautiful Bill” to enact Trump’s agenda although it had failed on Friday when far-right Republicans voted against it, complaining it did not make deep enough cuts to social programs.
The vote tonight was a strict party line vote, with 16 Democrats voting against the measure, 17 Republicans voting for it, and 4 far right Republicans voting “present.” House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said there would be “minor modifications” to the measure; Representative Chip Roy (R-TX) wrote on X that those changes include new work requirements for Medicaid and cuts to green energy subsidies.
And so the bill moves forward.
In The Bulwark today, Jonathan Cohn noted that Republicans are in a tearing hurry to push that Big, Beautiful Bill through Congress before most of us can get a handle on what’s in it. Just a week ago, Cohn notes, there was still no specific language in the measure. Republican leaders didn’t release the piece of the massive bill that would cut Medicaid until last Sunday night and then announced the Committee on Energy and Commerce would take it up not even a full two days later, on Tuesday, before the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office could produce a detailed analysis of the cost of the proposals. The committee markup happened in a 26-hour marathon in which the parts about Medicaid happened in the middle of the night. And now, the bill moves forward in an unusual meeting late on a Sunday night.
Cohn recalls that in 2009, when the Democrats were pushing the Affordable Care Act, more popularly known as Obamacare, that measure had months of public debate before it went to the Committee on Energy and Commerce. That committee held eight separate hearings about healthcare reform, and it was just one of three committees working on the issue. The ACA markup took a full two weeks.
Cohn explains that Medicaid cuts are extremely unpopular, and the Republicans hope to jam those cuts through by claiming they are cutting “waste, fraud, and abuse” without leaving enough time for scrutiny. Cohn points out that if they are truly interested in savings, they could turn instead to the privatized part of Medicare, Medicare Advantage The Congressional Budget Office estimates that cutting overpayments to Medicare Advantage when private insurers “upcode” care to place patients in a higher risk bracket, could save more than $1 trillion over the next decade.
Instead of saving money, the Big, Beautiful Bill actually blows the budget deficit wide open by extending the 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that those extensions would cost at least $4.6 trillion over the next ten years. And while the tax cuts would go into effect immediately, the cuts to Medicaid are currently scheduled not to hit until 2029, enabling the Republicans to avoid voter fury over them in the midterms and the 2028 election.
The prospect of that debt explosion led Moody’s on Friday to downgrade U.S. credit for the first time since 1917, following Fitch, which downgraded the U.S. rating in 2023, and Standard & Poor’s, which did so back in 2011. “If the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is extended, which is our base case,” Moody’s explained, “it will add around $4 trillion to the federal fiscal primary (excluding interest payments) deficit over the next decade. As a result, we expect federal deficits to widen, reaching nearly 9% of GDP by 2035, up from 6.4% in 2024, driven mainly by increased interest payments on debt, rising entitlement spending and relatively low revenue generation.”
Steven Beschloss calls for more activism today at his substack, America, America. “Heeding the Warnings! We must avoid normalcy bias, expand our imagination, and both recognize and confront the fascistic danger of the Trump regime.”
Last week On Tyranny author Timothy Snyder warned that the second 100 days of the Trump regime could entail a dangerous escalation that includes some kind of terrorist attack. Imagining this can be hard; it’s understandable to ignore such a warning since it’s not yet true, it’s unpleasant to consider—and yes, it may not happen.
But it’s worth listening to what this historian of authoritarian regimes envisions—a warning layered with advice on how to prepare and how to respond. “I think it’s very important to expect there will now be exogenous surprises,” he said in a short video, including the “bottom falling out” of the economy because of the tariffs, “a major disruption” within the U.S. or even some kind of terrorist attack.
“Don’t fall for language about extremism or terrorism,” Snyder urged if it happens. He also emphasized the importance of staying calm, being active and sticking together. “Be aware that this is the pretext that will be used to push things further…use it as an opportunity to hold the people responsible who should be taking responsibility.”
This mirrors what he said in one of the final chapters of his short book that offers lessons to prepare, one entitled “Be calm when the unthinkable arrives.” His thinking draws on the Reichstag Fire staged by Hitler and the Nazis in 1933.
Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Do not fall for it.
As he notes in a Substack piece published last month about the possibility of such an attack, “The people in the White House have no governing skills, but they do have entertainment skills. They will seek to transform themselves from the villains of the story to the heroes, and in the process bring down the republic.”
None of us know if such an attack will happen. But I agree with Snyder that it’s important to expand our imaginations and be prepared if it does. That means not falling victim to normalcy bias.
Yes, millions of Americans failed to grasp the potential for disaster and crisis if Donald Trump were to occupy the White House again. But rather than look backward and rue that misfortune, let’s look forward and do what we can.
Warn the people we know. Warn the people we meet. Reach out on social media and email to our friends and communities. Contact our elected officials. Participate in public demonstrations and bring friends with us.
Let them all know this is an emergency—no time for business as usual and old ways of doing things. There’s an arsonist in the White House aggressively seeking to end our constitutional republic, free speech and the rule of law. And let’s not lose sight of our collective power to ensure that the Trump regime’s desired trajectory is not inevitable.
The Financial Markets are reeling. This is from NYT. “Markets Rattled on Concerns About U.S. Debt. Stocks fell, the dollar slipped, and bond yields jumped after a rating downgrade highlighted worries about the cost of President Trump’s policies and the health of the economy.”
Turbulent trading hit financial markets on Monday, with investors selling U.S. stocks and bonds and the dollar, an ugly combination that suggests sentiment is souring on the outlook for the world’s largest economy.
The S&P 500 index fell about 1 percent in early trading in New York. Bond markets shuddered, with U.S. Treasury prices falling and their yields, which underpin interest rates across the economy, rising. The 10-year yield jumped a tenth of a percentage point, a large move in that market, to 4.54 percent. The dollar also fell, with a gauge of its value against other major currencies slipping 0.8 percent.
One factor jarring markets is a bill in Congress that would make President Trump’s signature 2017 tax cuts permanent and could add trillions of dollars to federal debt. A House committee voted to approve the bill Sunday night, although it was expected to remain a focus of contentious congressional debate.
The United States’ loss of its last triple-A credit rating late on Friday and mounting concerns about government debt have threatened to disrupt the relative calm in markets that has prevailed since Mr. Trump paused many of his tariffs in recent weeks.
In downgrading the U.S. credit rating, Moody’s cited the tax cut legislation along with broader concerns about the fiscal deficit and growing debt costs. The move by Moody’s means that all three major rating agencies no longer consider the United States qualified for their top credit ratings.
The U.S. credit rating downgrade and worries about debt and deficits could further upset financial markets if they begin to shake the safe-haven status of Treasury bonds. That would likely spur global investors to demand higher premiums in return for buying U.S. debt.
On Monday, the 30-year Treasury yield rose to its highest level in a year and a half, above 5 percent.
The market has yet to fully absorb the Treasury Bond Dump by China. This is from the Daily HODL (News and Insight for the Digital Economy). Yes, I’m getting seriously nerdy for you know. This is the kind of stuff that drives my research and derivatives class lectures. This is the stuff that should frighten everyone if they ever knew about it. “China Dumps $18,900,000,000 in Treasuries as US Government Faces Major Dilemma: Macro Analyst Luke Gromen.”
Macro investor Luke Gromen warns that the countries buying more USTs won’t be able to simultaneously buy more American-manufactured goods, further hurting America’s trade deficit that President Trump has promised to address.
“Foreign UST holdings rose $133 billion Mar vs. Feb.
UK, Caymans, and Canada were $86 billion of that $133 billion; China sold $19 billion.
UK surpassed China as the 2nd biggest US foreign creditor for 1st time ever in March.
Cayman Islands (pop. ~73,000) is now the fourth biggest US foreign creditor at $455 billion…
How are they going to buy both USTs and more goods from America going forward?”
Analysts reportedly told Reuters that Chinese holdings of USTs have been in a downward trajectory since 2018, even though foreign holdings of Treasuries surged to an all-time high of $9.05 trillion in March.
That means our exports will go down in many of the countries. It’s damned recessionary. Also, if the price of bonds goes down because a country dumps their portfolio of treasuries, the interest rates go up. It will be truly interesting to see what the Fed does with this. Then there’s this. I bet Senator Warren is apoplectic. This report comes from The Guardian. You remember how fun that crash was. “US reportedly plans to slash bank rules imposed to prevent 2008-style crash. Watchdogs could cut capital rules as Trump’s deregulation drive opens door to rollback of post-crisis protections.”
US watchdogs are reportedly planning to slash capital rules for banks designed to prevent another 2008-style crash, as Donald Trump’s deregulation drive opens the door to the biggest rollback of post-crisis protections in more than a decade.
The move follows heavy lobbying by the banking industry, with lenders such as JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs having long complained that competition and lending have been hindered by burdensome rules governing the assets they must hold versus their liabilities.
Regulators are expected to put forward the proposals this summer, aimed at cutting the supplementary leverage ratio that requires big banks to hold high-quality capital against risky assets including loans and derivatives, according to the Financial Times, which cited unnamed sources.
The rules came into force after the 2008 financial crisis, as part of efforts to shockproof the banking system and avoid damaging ripple effects that could cause another global economic meltdown. The crisis forced governments to spend billions of dollars bailing out big lenders that took too much risk.
Changes to bank capital rules have been widely expected, with Trump having promised a bonfire of regulation during his second term in office, with plans to slash 10 regulations for every new one added.
While some critics warn it is the wrong time to slash protections, given growing uncertainty over policy overhauls and market volatility, banks seem to have won the ear of policymakers. Lobbyists have long argued that the rules punish them for holding relatively low-risk assets including US debt, known as treasuries, and hinders their ability to provide more loans.
President Joe Biden’s diagnosis of metastatic prostate cancer has understandably raised concerns and questions: How long has he had cancer, how will he be treated, and what is his prognosis?
As a urologist, I regularly diagnose prostate cancer in my patients, and each time I share the diagnosis with them and their family, it’s never easy. Over time, I’ve learned the importance of keeping conversations simple and straightforward — avoiding sugar-coating and instead using data, statistics and personal experience to help patients begin their cancer journey.
As his public announcement draws attention to this type of cancer, it’s a reminder to regularly check on your own health. Here’s what you need to know about metastatic prostate cancer: how it’s detected, what treatments look like, and why early screening remains essential for men’s health.
The former president’s diagnosis began after he experienced “increasing urinary symptoms,” his office said, and a prostate nodule was discovered.
…
“Metastatic” means the cancer cells have spread beyond the original location (the prostate gland) into other areas — most commonly bones and lymph nodes. Biden’s cancer has specifically spread to his bones, placing him among the 5% to 7% of prostate cancer cases in the United States that are metastatic at initial diagnosis. While this percentage seems small, it represents a significant number given that over 300,000 men in the US and approximately 1.5 million worldwide are diagnosed with prostate cancer every year.
Early-stage prostate cancer carries an excellent prognosis, with nearly a 100% five-year survival rate. However, when prostate cancer is metastatic at diagnosis, the five-year survival rate drops sharply to around 37%. Importantly, these survival rates are statistical averages, and individual outcomes vary considerably based on overall health, age, cancer aggressiveness, and how well a patient responds to treatment.
All of the #FARTUS policies add up to a big mess for the economy. It’s driving me back to research again. But right now, I guess I’ll go blow some bubbles for a while.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Racist bros may carry flaming tiki torches to intimidate and marginalize. But New Orleans carries tiki bubble torches to bring joy and fight entitled rich dudes
Val Kilmer, a homegrown Hollywood actor who tasted leading-man stardom as Jim Morrison and Batman, but whose protean gifts and elusive personality also made him a high-profile supporting player, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 65.
The cause was pneumonia, said his daughter, Mercedes Kilmer. Mr. Kilmer was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014 but later recovered, she said.
Youthful Val Kilmer
Tall and handsome in a rock-star sort of way, Mr. Kilmer was in fact cast as a rocker a handful of times early in his career, when he seemed destined for blockbuster success. He made his feature debut in the slapstick Cold War spy-movie spoof “Top Secret!” (1984), in which he starred as a crowd-pleasing, hip-shaking American singer in Berlin unwittingly involved in an East German plot to reunify the country.
He gave a vividly stylized performance as Jim Morrison, the emblem of psychedelic sensuality, in Oliver Stone’s “The Doors” (1991), and he played the cameo role of Mentor — an advice-giving Elvis as imagined by the film’s antiheroic protagonist, played by Christian Slater — in “True Romance” (1993), a violent drug-chase caper written by Quentin Tarantino and directed by Tony Scott.
Mr. Kilmer had top billing (ahead of Sam Shepard) in “Thunderheart” (1992), in which he played an unseasoned F.B.I. agent investigating a murder on a South Dakota Indian reservation, and in “The Saint” (1997), a thriller about a debonair, resourceful thief playing cat-and-mouse with the Russian mob. Most famously, perhaps, between Michael Keaton and George Clooney he inhabited the title role (and the batsuit) in “Batman Forever” (1995), doing battle in Gotham City with Two-Face (Tommy Lee Jones) and the Riddler (Jim Carrey), though neither Mr. Kilmer nor the film were viewed as stellar representatives of the Batman franchise….
But by then another, perhaps more interesting, strain of Mr. Kilmer’s career had developed. In 1986, Mr. Scott cast him in his first big-budget film, “Top Gun” (1986), the testosterone-fueled adventure drama about Navy fighter pilots in training, in which Mr. Kilmer played the cool, cocky rival to the film’s star, Tom Cruise. It was a role that set a precedent for several of Mr. Kilmer’s other prominent appearances as a co-star or a member of a starry ensemble. He reprised it in a brief cameo in the film’s 2022 sequel, “Top Gun: Maverick.”
He played the urbane, profligate gunslinger Doc Holliday in “Tombstone” (1993), a bloody western, alongside Kurt Russell, Sam Elliott and Bill Paxton as Wyatt, Virgil and Morgan Earp. He was part of a robbery gang in “Heat” (1995), a contemporary urban “High Noon”-ish tale that was a vehicle for Robert De Niro as the mastermind of a heist and Al Pacino as the cop who chases him down. He was a co-star, billed beneath Michael Douglas, in “The Ghost and the Darkness” (1996), a period piece about lion hunting set in late 19th century Africa. In “Pollock” (2000), starring Ed Harris as the painter Jackson Pollock, he was a fellow artist, Willem de Kooning. He played Philip of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great (Colin Farrell), in Oliver Stone’s grandiose epic “Alexander” (2004).
Val Kilmer had such intense magnetism that he could make a flyboy villain charming. He could make a smug young genius endearing. He could make a frontier gunman dying from tuberculosis not just tragically romantic but somehow sexy. In a career spanning four decades, the actor both embraced and shattered the expectations of a Hollywood leading man. Even after years battling throat cancer, which robbed him of his voice and heartthrob physique, Kilmer still managed to deliver one more emotional performance that bookended his adventurous onscreen life.
That was Top Gun: Maverick in 2022, in which Kilmer reprised his role as Tom “Iceman” Kazansky, the fighter pilot who serves as the chief rival to Tom Cruise’s naval aviator in the blockbuster 1986 original. Both men were still just starting out as actors at that point. Kilmer had broken through as a spoof of Elvis Presley in the 1984 spy farce Top Secret! and was the high-IQ slacker in 1985’s Real Genius when he took on the role of the hotshot antagonist. In the sequel, set decades later, Iceman is an admiral in charge of the Navy’s Pacific Fleet, and he and Maverick have long patched over their youthful clashes to become not just friends but brothers in arms. Kilmer was several years into his cancer treatments in real life, and no longer able to act full time, but Cruise went to great lengths to incorporate him in the story, making Kilmer’s declining condition a part of the character. It brought an emotional closure to a pop culture story that had already resonated with millions around the world, and was the last time moviegoers saw Kilmer onscreen. It was not just a goodbye to Iceman, but a goodbye to the actor as well.
Kilmer succumbed to pneumonia and died on Tuesday at the age of 65.
He never tried to hide his health struggles, and in 2021 participated in the documentary Val, which chronicled his day-to-day activities recovering from various treatments that left his voice a raspy whisper and drained his strength. His son, Jack Kilmer, narrated the story by reading his father’s words. “I have behaved poorly, I have behaved bravely, I have behaved bizarrely to some,” read one self-reflective line. The movie included old VHS footage Kilmer recorded of himself and his friends, documenting his life on movie sets and his wild-child approach to creativity. It was that willingness to take risks and challenge himself that made him unpredictable and surprising as a performer. Kilmer was many things in his life, and those watching him never knew what to expect.
Read the rest at Vanity Fair.
Democrats had a good day yesterday. Senator Cory Booker inspired with a record-breaking filibuster, and Democratic candidates overperformed in special elections in Florida and won control of Wisconsin Supreme Court with the election of liberal judge Susan Crawford.
Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., wanted to do something extraordinary. He knew Democratic voters were desperate for it.
So he took to the Senate floor with little fanfare and went on to deliver a marathon speech — excoriating the Trump administration for lawlessness and undermining American values and in the process breaking the record for longest Senate speech ever, yielding Tuesday after 25 hours and 5 minutes.
It was a cathartic moment for a vast swath of demoralized voters across the country, who tuned in amid hunger for some action by the opposition party beyond the traditions of business as usual.
And for a Democratic Party that has been lost in the wilderness since its bruising defeat to Donald Trump last fall, it offered a rare moment of hope to pursue what may be its only chance of slowing Trump down: inspiring a mass popular uprising against him.
“There’s a lot of people out there asking Democrats to do more and to take risks and do things differently,” an exhausted Booker told reporters after he walked off the floor. “This seemed like the right thing to do. And from what my staff is telling me, a lot of people watched. And so we’ll see what it is. I just think a lot of us have to do a lot more, including myself.”
Throughout Tuesday afternoon, Booker was trending across social media, including on TikTok, BlueSky and even Elon Musk’s X.
The speech got over 350 million “likes” on Booker’s TikTok livestream of his remarks, according to his office, including more than 300,000 people viewing them across his platform at once. It prompted over 200 stories from New Jerseyans and Americans in response. And it drew over 28,000 voicemails of encouragement on Booker’s office phone line, along with public accolades from Democratic luminaries like former Vice President Kamala Harris and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., the former House speaker.
Heather Cox Richardson at Letters from an American: April 1, 2025.
For more than 25 hours he held the floor of the Senate, not reading from the phone book or children’s literature, as some of his predecessors have done, but delivering a coherent, powerful speech about the meaning of America and the ways in which the Trump regime is destroying our democracy.
Senator Cory Booker
On the same day that John Hudson of the Washington Post reported that members of Donald Trump’s National Security Council, including national security advisor Michael Waltz, have been skirting presidential records laws and exposing national security by using Gmail accounts to conduct government business, and the same day that mass layoffs at the Department of Health and Human Services gutted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Booker launched a full-throated defense of the United States of America.
Booker began his marathon speech at 7:00 on the evening of March 31 with little fanfare. In a video recorded before he began, he said that he had “been hearing from people from all over my state and indeed all over the nation calling upon folks in Congress to do more, to do things that recognize the urgency—the crisis—of the moment. And so we all have a responsibility, I believe to do something different to cause, as John Lewis said, good trouble, and that includes me.”
On the floor of the Senate, Booker again invoked the late Representative John Lewis of Georgia, who had been one of the original Freedom Riders challenging racial segregation in 1961 and whose skull law enforcement officers fractured on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 as Lewis joined the marchers on their way to Montgomery to demand their voting rights be protected.
Booker reminded listeners that Lewis was famous for telling people to “get in good trouble, necessary trouble. Help redeem the soul of America.” Booker said that in the years since Trump took office, he has been asking himself, “[H]ow am I living up to his words?”
“Tonight I rise with the intention of getting in some good trouble. I rise with the intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able. I rise tonight because I believe sincerely that our country is in crisis and I believe that not in a partisan sense,” he said, “because so many of the people that have been reaching out to my office in pain, in fear, having their lives upended—so many of them identify themselves as Republicans.”
A trio of elections on Tuesday provided early warning signs to Republicans and President Donald Trump at the beginning of an ambitious term, as Democrats rallied against his efforts to slash the federal government and the outsize role being played by billionaire Elon Musk.
In the marquee race for a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat, the conservative judge endorsed by Trump and backed by Musk and his groups to the tune of $21 million lost by a significant margin in a state Trump won in November. And while Florida Republicans held two of the most pro-Trump House districts in the country, both candidates also underperformed Trump’s November margins.
The elections — the first major contests since Trump’s return to power — were seen as an early measure of voter sentiment as Trump works with unprecedented speed to dramatically upend the federal government, clashing with the courts and seeking revenge as he tests the bounds of presidential power.
The party that loses the presidency in November typically picks up seats in the next midterm elections, and Tuesday’s results provided hope for Democrats — who have faced a barrage of internal and external criticism about their response to Trump — that they can follow that trend.
On the Wisconsin Supreme Court race:
Trump won Wisconsin in November by 0.8 percentage points, or fewer than 30,000 votes. In the first major test since he took office, the perennial battleground state shifted significantly to the left.
Sauk County, northwest of the state capital of Madison, is a state bellwether. Trump won it in November by 626 votes. Sauk shifted 14 points in the direction of Judge Susan Crawford, the liberal favorite backed by national Democrats and billionaire donors like George Soros.
Besides strong turnout in Democratic-heavy areas, Crawford did measurably better in the suburban Milwaukee counties that Republicans rely on to run up their margins statewide.
Elon Musk in Green Bay, Wisconsin pretending to be a Cheeshead
Crawford won Kenosha and Racine counties, both of which went for Trump over Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. She was on pace to win by 9 percentage points.
In interviews with more than 20 voters in Waunakee, a politically mixed town north of Madison, several Democrats suggested without prompting that their vote was as much if not more of a repudiation of Trump’s first months in office as it was a decision on the direction of the state high court….
Others disliked the richest man in the world playing such a prominent role.
“I don’t like Elon Musk spending money for an election he should have no involvement in,” said Antonio Gray, a 38-year-old Milwaukee security guard. “They should let the voters vote for who they want to vote for instead of inserting themselves like they have.”
Elon Musk went all out trying to win Republican control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
Musk and his related groups dropped more than $20 million on boosting the conservative candidate, a former state attorney general, Brad Schimel. (Those $1 million sweepstakes giveaways were especially shameless.) Musk held a town hall/rally in Green Bay on Sunday, where he urged folks to back Schimel, and he pitched the race as “one of those things that may not seem that it’s going to affect the entire destiny of humanity, but I think it will.”
In helping make this probably the most expensive court contest of all time, Musk also turned it into a referendum on himself and his role in the Trump administration. Schimel, bless his heart, could have been the greatest candidate in the history of democracy — he wasn’t — and it wouldn’t have mattered. This became all about Elon, with a dash of Donald Trump thrown in.
Wisconsinites’ response: No, thanks, bruh. Despite Musk’s hysterical warnings and cheesehead preening, Schimel’s opponent, Susan Crawford, won by about 10 points, securing the court’s liberal majority.
Cottle says that anxious Republicans should grasp this opportunity to get rid of the unlikeable multi-billionaire.
Musk has his money-drenched tentacles wrapped tightly around the president. To start disentangling him and moving him toward the door, Republican lawmakers need to make the case that he is hurting Trump’s popularity — and threatening the G.O.P.’s unified control of Washington. Musk’s expensive Wisconsin flop is a big, red warning flag for Republican members to wave. They’d be wise to seize the moment while this failure is raw, missing no opportunity to remind the president what a political loser his buddy is turning out to be.
Waiting will only make the situation worse. DOGE is just getting warmed up. There’s no telling how much more damage Musk will do — to the nation and to the Republican Party — by the time a smattering of elections are decided this November. The mass layoffs of federal workers are already expected to damage Republicans’ fortunes in the Virginia governor’s race, seen as a key political bellwether.
And by next year’s midterms? Let’s just say voters can go to bloodthirsty from adoring in a flash when people start messing with their Social Security and Medicaid.
“I don’t know when it was signed, because I didn’t sign it,” President Trump told reporters on March 22. In the span of a week, the president “forgot” that he invoked the Alien Enemies Act to summarily deport hundreds of people to a Salvadoran gulag.
“Other people handled it, but Marco Rubio has done a great job and he wanted them out and we go along with that,” he mumbled vaguely.
The media framed the debacle as a clever effort to “downplay his involvement” in the ugly episode, rather than evidence that the president is totally checked out and letting other people run the government.
And yet, just five days before his own memory lapse, Trump “declared” his predecessor’s pardons of the January 6 Committee “VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT” because Biden was too senile to understand them….
The post is part of an ongoing campaign to undo Biden’s presidency by claiming that he was too incompetent by the end to exercise actual power, and some unnamed, shadowy figure was running the White House instead. It’s shockingly inappropriate, of course. But the juxtaposition is even more jarring as we are daily confronted with a president who is disengaged from the details of his job, preferring to outsource most of his authority to an unelected billionaire….
Undoing pardons is not a thing. Not even if Biden used an autopen. As the Supreme Court made clear in Trump v. US, the president’s exercise of his “core” powers, specifically the pardon, is unreviewable. But Trump is captured by internet memes, and so he’s thrilled to amplify the “autopen” conspiracy currently flooding the rightwing media ecosystem.
Old Man Trump
“The person that operated the autopen, I think we ought to find out who that was because I guess that was the real president,” Trump said in the Oval Office on March 20.
Read the whole thing if you have time, but here’s the meat of it:
Trump, who, at 78, is just three years younger than Biden, is clearly decompensating before our eyes. And yet, even as he free associates on live television, back-formulating justifications for orders he’s obviously never read, the right leans ever harder into the story of Biden’s supposed incompetence….
Trump doesn’t know what he’s signed when it comes to pardons, executive orders, or anything else. He’s outsourced the job to an unelected billionaire who is currently slashing through the government, bragging on social media about feeding entire federal agencies “to the woodchipper.” Elon Musk leads cabinet meetings, dispatches his henchcoders to take over agency after agency, and purports to cancel federal contracts at will. He has no statutory authority, but claims only to be acting as an extension of the president….
In short, Musk is the autopen, illegitimately usurping executive power while claiming to be a mere extension of the president, mechanically recording his wishes and codifying his orders. And so, to compensate, Trump leans into the old, familiar foil.
It’s not the Trump kids who are trading on their father’s position to enrich themselves. It’s Hunter Biden. It’s not the Trump administration storing classified information on unsecured devices. It’s Hillary Clinton. And it’s not Donald Trump who signs whatever his aides put in front of him, no matter how corrupt. It’s Joe Biden.
I think she’s right. Trump is spending most of his time posting on Truth Social, playing golf, and fantasizing about annexing Greenland.
The White House is preparing an estimate of what it would cost the federal government to control Greenland as a territory, according to three people with knowledge of the matter, the most concrete effort yet to turn President Donald Trump’s desire to acquire the Danish island into actionable policy.
While Trump’s demands elicited international outrage and a rebuke from Denmark, White House officials have in recent weeks taken steps to determine the financial ramifications of Greenland becoming a U.S. territory, including the cost of providing government services for its 58,000 residents, the people said.
At the White House budget office, staff have sought to understand the potential cost to maintain Greenland if it were acquired, two of the people said. They are also attempting to estimate what revenue to the U.S. Treasury could be gained from Greenland’s natural resources.
One option under analysis is to offer a sweeter deal to the government of Greenland than the Danes, who currently subsidize services on the island at a rate of about $600 million every year.
“This is a lot higher than that,” said one official familiar with the plans, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss plans that remain in the works. “The point is, ‘We’ll pay you more than Denmark does.’”
Trump has said repeatedly that the United States will “get” Greenland.
“100 percent,” he told NBC News on Saturday. Asked whether it would involve force, he said that there is a “good possibility that we could do it without military force” but that “I don’t take anything off the table.”
If only the Democrats could take the House and Senate in 2026, they could impeach this insane monster.
I know this is getting long, but I need to include one more outrage: the decimation of public health infrastructure.
The Trump administrationgutted federal health agencies on Tuesday morning, as thousands of employees received layoff notices, following Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s announcement last week he was planning to lay off nearly 10,000 workers.
More than 7,000 workers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services were cut. Staffers with decades of experience received emails at 5 a.m. on Tuesday that they were being placed on administrative leave and would no longer have access to their buildings, effective immediately. In the Washington D.C. area, thousands of federal workers lined up outside office buildings to see if their badges worked, as they hugged each other in tears.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Kennedy, a vaccine skeptic, is attempting to gut the agencies and remake them in his image. These cuts will allow HHS to consolidate not only authority but messaging, as many of the departments affected involve communications departments. The massive layoffs are part of Donald Trump’s broader purge of the federal workforce, and parallel what Elon Musk is doing with his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which claims to be streamlining the federal government, but is gutting entire agencies. Musk’s DOGE has celebrated the cancellations of NIH grants, something Senator Cory Booker decried during his record-breaking filibuster on Tuesday.
On Tuesday, entire divisions were completely obliterated in a move that shocked HHS staffers. Hundreds of researchers studying diseases like HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases were laid off. “I cannot think of a worse idea than firing the people who help keep us healthy and safe from disease,” Senator Raphael Warnock said on X. This comes at a time when the U.S. is suffering from a nationwide measles outbreak….
“It’s so chaotic,” says a CDC employee who received notice Tuesday morning that she was being placed on administrative leave and would be terminated in June. (She asked to remain anonymous for fear of legal retribution, so she’ll be referred to by the pseudonym Samantha.) “The amount of knowledge that is being purged today at CDC is just tragic.” [….]
Samantha, who worked at the CDC’s Division of Environmental Health and Science Practice (DEHSP), says her entire division was eliminated. That includes the Asthma and Air Quality Branch, the Lead Poisoning Prevention and Surveillance Branch, the Climate and Health Activity branch, and the Water Food and Environmental Health Services, among others. Approximately 2,400 employees have been impacted in the CDC.
“They are firing whole organizational units,” says Samantha. “These are people that have 30 years of service, people with children, veterans, there was no thought put into trying to retain people that have institutional knowledge.”
Several top scientists charged with overseeing research into disease prevention and cures at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) were notified that they were subject to a reduction in force on Tuesday as part of a devastating purge of federal employees carried out by US Health and Human Services secretary Robert Kennedy Jr., WIRED has learned.
Multiple sources at the NIH, granted anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media, confirmed Tuesday afternoon that at least 10 principal investigators who were leading and directing medical research at the agency had been fired. Among them is Dr. Richard Youle, a leading researcher in the field of neurodegenerative disorders previously awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for his groundbreaking research identifying mechanisms behind Parkinson’s disease.
The Breakthrough Prize ceremony, often referred to as the “Oscars of Science,” was last year attended by Elon Musk, whose Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has served as the tip of the spear in President Donald Trump’s campaign to eliminate large swaths of the federal workforce….
Multiple NIH sources tell WIRED the layoffs include—in addition to labor, IT, and human resources personnel—several accomplished senior investigators at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), top scientists at the National Institute on Aging, and several researchers noted for their work in HIV, emerging infectious diseases, and child brain and neural disorders.
At an NINDS town hall meeting on Tuesday, leadership at that institute expressed confusion about the cuts, saying they were blindsided by firings of principal investigators, or PIs, who lead research teams. NIH has approximately 1,200 PIs across its 27 centers and institutes. “To get rid of 11 of our senior PIs … we’re hoping that’s a mistake, because we can’t figure out why they would want to do that,” said Walter Koroshetz, director of the NINDS, according to a source present at the meeting.
The labs affected by the layoffs include those involved in clinical trials as well as preclinical studies. It is unclear, NIH staff said, what the plans are for the data they’ve accumulated or what will happen to patients involved in ongoing trials.
I’ll end there. What do you think? What’s on your mind today?
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I feel like I’m pretty much over my cold, but I’m still very tired and keep dozing off in the daytime. Then I realized that my mother died a year ago yesterday, so maybe that partially explains why I’m feeling sad and tired. At least I’m no longer going through box after box of Kleenex. Despite everything, I’m very excited about Kamala Harris and I really believe we have a shot at beating Grandpa Trump.
Vice President Kamala Harris opened up a marginal two-percentage-point lead over Republican Donald Trump after President Joe Biden ended his re-election campaign and passed the torch to her, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found.
That compares with a marginal two-point deficit Biden faced against Trump in last week’s poll before his Sunday exit from the race.
The new poll, conducted on Monday and Tuesday, followed both the Republican National Convention where Trump on Thursday formally accepted the nomination and Biden’s announcement on Sunday he was leaving the race and endorsing Harris.
Harris, whose campaign says she has secured the Democratic nomination, led Trump 44% to 42% in the national poll, a difference within the 3-percentage-point margin of error.
Harris and Trump were tied at 44% in a July 15-16 poll, and Trump led by one percentage point in a July 1-2 poll, both within the same margin of error.
In Vice President Kamala Harris’ quick, if unorthodox, rise to the top of the Democratic ticket, elected officials, activists and operatives see in her a new chance to beat Donald Trump and make history in one swoop.
Eight years after Trump beat Hillary Clinton, Harris could be the first female president and the first Black woman to hold the nation’s top job, as well.
Democrats are somewhat optimistic, now set in a landscape they didn’t have in 2016: a messenger in Harris who is uniquely positioned to energize voters following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn national abortion rights, more proof from the ballot box that women can win in battleground areas and the knowledge that Trump himself is beatable — if still politically dangerous.
“The lessons that still apply [from 2016] are that people need to take Trump and his supporters seriously,” Shaunna Thomas, who co-founded and runs the pro-women group Ultraviolet, told NBC News. “That’s even more of a top-line message than whether or not a woman can win the presidency.” [….]
Now, many of the party operatives and groups who pushed for Clinton to be the first female president are working, to borrow a phrase from President Joe Biden, to “finish the job.”
“‘Let’s finish the job’ is actually for us, too, from 2016,” said Mini Timmaraju, who leads the pro-abortion-rights group Reproductive Freedom for All and was the women’s vote director on Clinton’s 2016 campaign. “We ran and lost against Donald Trump and we suffered an incredible, horrific loss nationwide overturning Roe and so much damage to our country that this is sort of the ultimate fight back for us.”
A Harris victory in November would mean finishing the job that many of those operatives started with Clinton, one that extends further back to Shirley Chisholm, of New York, the first Black woman in Congress, who ran her own historic long-shot presidential bid in 1972.
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice,” Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., who once worked to elect Chisholm and now backs Harris, told NBC News.
History has its eye on us. President Biden’s decision to end his campaign was as pure an act of patriotism as I have seen in my lifetime. It should also be a call to action to the rest of us to continue his fight for the soul of our nation. The next 15 weeks will be like nothing this country has ever experienced politically, but have no doubt: This is a race Democrats can and must win.
Mr. Biden has done a hard and rare thing. Serving as president was a lifelong dream. And when he finally got there, he was exceptionally good at it. To give that up, to accept that finishing the job meant passing the baton, took real moral clarity. The country mattered more. As one who shared that dream and has had to make peace with letting it go, I know this wasn’t easy. But it was the right thing to do.
Elections are about the future. That’s why I am excited about Vice President Kamala Harris. She represents a fresh start for American politics. She can offer a hopeful, unifying vision. She is talented, experienced and ready to be president. And I know she can defeat Donald Trump.
There is now an even sharper, clearer choice in this election. On one side is a convicted criminal who cares only about himself and is trying to turn back the clock on our rights and our country. On the other is a savvy former prosecutor and successful vice president who embodies our faith that America’s best days are still ahead. It’s old grievances versus new solutions.
On the attacks Harris will face:
Ms. Harris’s record and character will be distorted and disparaged by a flood of disinformation and the kind of ugly prejudice we’re already hearing from MAGA mouthpieces. She and the campaign will have to cut through the noise, and all of us as voters must be thoughtful about what we read, believe and share.
I know a thing or two about how hard it can be for strong women candidates to fight through the sexism and double standards of American politics. I’ve been called a witch, a “nasty woman” and much worse. I was even burned in effigy. As a candidate, I sometimes shied away from talking about making history. I wasn’t sure voters were ready for that. And I wasn’t running to break a barrier; I was running because I thought I was the most qualified to do the job. While it still pains me that I couldn’t break that highest, hardest glass ceiling, I’m proud that my two presidential campaigns made it seem normal to have a woman at the top of the ticket.
Ms. Harris will face unique additional challenges as the first Black and South Asian woman to be at the top of a major party’s ticket. That’s real, but we shouldn’t be afraid. It is a trap to believe that progress is impossible. After all, I won the national popular vote by nearly three million in 2016, and it’s not so long ago that Americans overwhelmingly elected our first Black president. As we saw in the 2022 midterms, abortion bans and attacks on democracy are galvanizing women voters like never before. With Ms. Harris at the top of the ticket leading the way, this movement may become an unstoppable wave.
Time is short to organize the campaign on her behalf, but the Labour Party in Britain and a broad left-wing coalition in France recently won big victories with even less time. Ms. Harris will have to reach out to voters who have been skeptical of Democrats and mobilize young voters who need convincing. But she can run on a strong record and ambitious plans to further reduce costs for families, enact common-sense gun safety laws and restore and protect our rights and freedoms.
Read more at the link. I got past the paywall by using the link at memorandum.com.
Just three days after President Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, Harris has already secured enough delegates to be the presumptive Democratic nominee. The speed with which the party came together around her is inspiring.
Harris has been endorsed by almost everyone who matters in Democratic politics — senators, governors, key organizations, unions. She’s also raised some $100 million and counting from more than 880,000 small donors, more than 60 percent of whom hadn’t contributed before this cycle. If anyone was on the fence about whether Biden stepping aside was the right move, they probably aren’t now.
The past three days have been a remarkable display of Democratic consensus and unity after a bitter intra-party argument over whether Biden should be the nominee. The rush to support Harris also indicates that the party believes she can beat the Republican candidate — giant orange fascist blight Donald Trump.
New Harris-Trump polling started trickling out yesterday, and it contained good news for Democrats. A Reuters/Ipsos poll taken entirely after Biden announced his decision to step aside showed Harris up two points nationally (and up four points when RFK Jr. is included). Another poll showed Harris and Trump tied.
Given that Harris just had her first rally as the presumptive candidate yesterday, we’ll need more time to figure out exactly how the race has changed. But there are already a number of reasons to be hopeful about her prospects of winning this November.
Of course there are risks.
Unifying looked easy. It’s not.
The first indication of Harris’s strength is … well, pretty much everything that’s happened since Sunday.
Harris has been pilloried over the last four years as a middling politician, largely on the grounds that she suspended her 2020 presidential campaign before Iowa. The reliably confused Pamela Paul at the New York Times, for example, argued this week that “Harris is a fundamentally weak candidate” who “fizzled out” in the presidential race.
As political scientist Jonathan Bernstein points out, though, Harris’s candidacy didn’t fizzle out. She had solid endorsements and decent polling — but she figured out that Biden was too far ahead to beat in a very crowded field and dropped out early. That allowed her to stay on good terms with party actors and put her in a position to get the vice presidency. That’s not losing. It’s winning.
We have even better recent evidence that Harris is a skillful politician, though. Namely, she just nailed down the presidential nomination in around 48 hours and raised $100 million.
The rush to endorse Harris and the flood of donations was so speedy and so uniform that it looked easy. But there was no guarantee it would go so well. AOC warned last week before Biden stepped down that many donors “do not want to see the VP be the nominee.” Some leading Democrats, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, were calling for an open process or some kind of mini primary.
Harris certainly benefited from the fact that Democrats are sick of division and eager to move on to uniting against Trump. But her strength also indicates that she has used her vice presidency to solidify her standing with most party actors and interest groups — not least with Joe Biden himself. Harris engineered an unprecedented victory immediately following an unprecedented moment of uncertainty for the party. That’s the work of a talented politician.
Going with Harris also more or less splits the difference in risk aversion within the party. The core of the debate over whether Biden should drop out hinged on one’s perception of where the biggest risks sat: Were they primarily vested in the candidate himself? Or were they in the potential for chaos?
The Democrats who thought the risks sat with the candidate got their way when Biden dropped out. Those who feared chaos are getting their way now, as the party rallies around Harris and avoids an open primary. It’s not how I would have chosen to do things, but there’s nevertheless a lot to recommend it.
Also: This is fun, isn’t it?
The Biden-Trump debate and the attempted Trump assassination and the days after were very much not fun; they were dreadful, scary, and divisive, and I was ultimately feeling pretty resigned to four more years of a Trump presidency. It frankly didn’t seem like Republicans were having much fun either. And not that politics need to be entertainment or a party — I frankly wish more people would elect boring highly competent technocrats — but also, people like parties because parties are fun.
For the first time this cycle, the election feels fun. The memes are not dark. The soundtrack is good. Harris is inspiring people not because she promises to stick it to Trump, but because she promises something better. Republicans are mocking her laugh, but god, how good does it feel to have a candidate who really laughs? Her dorky mom-isms feel sweet and endearing. The girls and the gays love her, and the youngs are talking about her in ways I frankly don’t understand, and isn’t that great. Sure, we danced in the streets when Biden won in 2020 because it was such a relief to see four years of Trump come to an end and also we had been so cooped up inside thanks to Covid. But no one was dancing at a Biden rally. Harris, on the other hand, is the chief executive of Brat Summer.
No, fun alone doesn’t win elections. But it sure doesn’t hurt. And Trump knows this as well as anyone.
After all, comparing footage from Trump’s 2015 presidential announcement to footage from earlier this year shows that Trump isn’t quite the man he used to be. The former president now routinely confuses names when speaking off the cuff — including the name of his own doctor — and struggled to finish his sentences during a Nashville rally earlier this year. How can the American people be sure Trump’s stumbles aren’t part of a sustained pattern of cognitive decline?
Trump has repeatedly said he believes all presidential candidates should be “mandated to take a cognitive test” regardless of age. There’s no time like the present, because the concerning evidence of Trump’s mental decline has been mounting for years.
His memory problems are well-documented; the former president doesn’t seem able to recall what he was doing or who he spoke to for most of the day on Jan. 6, 2021. He also regularly forgets who the sitting president is, often confusing Joe Biden and Barack Obama during unscripted remarks. That seems pretty important.
Concerns about how Trump’s age could weigh on the Republican ticket aren’t exclusive to Democrats like me. Sixty percent of voters now believe Trump is too old to serve, according to a post-debate ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll. That’s up from 44 percent a little over a year ago. Of voters who watched Trump’s rambling debate performance last month, fully 50 percent believe the former president should withdraw from the race and focus on his mental health.
Hahaha! Trump looks really old compared to Kamala, who is extremely energetic and enthusiastic.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has denied reports that emerged last week that he was planning to donate $45m a month to a Super Pac focused on getting Trump elected.
On Tuesday, Musk appeared on Jordan Peterson’s show, where he said the claim was “simply not true”. “I am not donating $45m a month to Trump,” he said.
“Now what I have done is that I have created a Pac or Super Pac or whatever you want to call it,” he said. It is called the America Pac.”
Super Pacs, short for Political Action Committees, are independent political organisations to which donors can give unlimited amounts of money, while donations to individuals or non-Super Pacs are capped.
After the Peterson interview, Musk replied on X to a clip from the interview saying, “Yeah”, and to another tweet referencing the reports saying, “Yeah, it’s ridiculous. I am making some donations to America PAC, but at a much lower level and the key values of the Pac are supporting a meritocracy & individual freedom. Republicans are mostly, but not entirely, on the side of merit & freedom”.
The denial comes days after Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race, endorsing his vice-president Kamala Harris, who now has enough delegates to claim the Democratic nomination in August.
Also on Tuesday, the New York Times reported that the Super Pac was being staffed by former aides to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign. “The Super Pac has acquired an air of mystery in the Trump orbit, with other outside groups largely in the dark about its plans,” the Times reported….
“The intent is to promote the principles that made America great in the first place,” Musk said on Peterson’s show. “I wouldn’t say that I’m for example Maga,” he added, referring to the Trump catchphrase. “I think America is great. I’m more M-A-G, make America greater.”
It sounds like Trump probably couldn’t use this money for legal expenses.
The joyful reception that Vice President Kamala Harris received from Democrats when President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed her was rooted largely in the contrast between the relatively youthful 59-year-old woman and the increasingly frail 81-year-old president. She gives good speeches! She’s fun and energetic! And she can campaign aggressively, especially with Biden remaining president, allowing Harris to make campaigning her full-time job. People in focus groups frequently say they haven’t seen much of Harris these past four years. Well, that’s about to change, since she is well-positioned to give endless interviews, attend frequent events, and give oh-so-many speeches. The contrast with Biden, who struggled to find the energy to campaign on top of running a country, will be notable.
The contrast stands not only with her boss but with her new opponent. It isn’t just Biden who has to limit public appearances, lest he get tired and cranky. Donald Trump, at age 78, has also been mostly absent from the traditional campaign rigamarole. He goes to occasional rallies, where his fans swoon over him, but which get relatively little press. There’s no incentive to cover his usual incoherent stump speech because he doesn’t break any news. He gives interviews to right-wing outlets, which mostly ask him how he got to be so darn perfect while avoiding topics that might draw interest from the larger public. He unloads his far-right venom on Truth Social, but since most journalists ignore that, he might as well be blogging into the void. He golfs a lot and, of course, had to sit in the untelevised trial in May, which resulted in 34 felony convictions. But to average Americans, especially swing voters who will decide the race, Trump is mostly out of sight and out of mind.
This appears very much by design. While they are being graded on a steep curve, Trump’s campaign managers are, as reported, more professional and competent than his previous hires. They’re no doubt aware that the biggest obstacle to persuading skeptical voters to back Trump is the candidate himself. His overt racism, sociopathic impulsivity, and off-the-charts narcissism turn off everyone who isn’t deeply in the MAGA cult. Every time Trump talks, it confirms the Biden campaign’s narrative that the former president is a self-centered jerk who will sell out the country for his own interests.
Trump has so far been able to stay out of the spotlight because of Biden. The president had a lightweight campaign presence. He barely did any interviews or press conferences, which only fueled speculation that the Biden team was hiding their candidate’s condition from public view. This enabled Trump to hang back, as well. Trump’s campaign created the illusion that he was campaigning more vigorously than Biden, by putting him out there in situations noticed by the press but not by ordinary voters. The rallies looked campaign-like while keeping Trump out of the news. Trump gave a lengthy interview to Time, in which he hinted at election violence and supported abortion bans. These views hurt him with swing voters, but almost no one heard about it, because it was a print interview in a publication few people outside of the Beltway read.
I have to admit, I was wrong. I’m still sad that Biden was forced to step down in such a humiliating way. But he handled it very well by waiting until the Republican Convention was over. Now they have to complete retune their arguments and attacks. No more Hunter Biden to kick around, no more old age insults, no more “Let’s go, Brandon.” Back to Marcotte:
Astute readers will remember that the reason Biden wanted a June debate was to remind voters what a vile person Trump is since so many memories had faded. If Biden had been coherent, the plan would have worked. As Heather “Digby” Parton wrote, Trump “couldn’t control himself and behaved once again like the undisciplined, lying, vulgarian who half the country already hates.” He told laughable lies, such as denying sex with Stormy Daniels. The post-debate fact-checker spoke as fast as he could to debunk Trump’s lies and finally had to quit from exhaustion after three minutes.
But once again, Biden’s age worked to cover up Trump’s myriad deficiencies. It was too troubling, watching the president stumble, to even pay that much attention to Trump’s same old lie-and-hate routine. Not just for journalists, either. Voters who watched the debate were too worried about Biden to pay much mind to Trump.
With Harris as the Democratic nominee, however, Trump is caught in a no-win situation. If he continues to hang back from the campaign trail while she’s out there hustling, he’ll start inviting the questions about whether he’s too old and weak, the exact questions that plagued Biden. But if he starts doing more media and events that are outside the MAGA bubble, he will draw negative attention and remind voters why they hate him. In the face of this paradox, Trump’s first impulse was to keep pretending Biden is his opponent. As reality sets in, Trump’s freaking out.
There more at the Salon link.
That’s all I have for you today. I’m very anxious to see what happens next in this reinvigorated campaign.
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I’m not sure how much I can post today. I’m down with a bad cold and I’m barely functioning. I did test for Covid and the result was negative. I’m not coughing, so I think it’s just a head cold.
I’m also really depressed about the way Democrats are publicly tearing down President Biden. It’s really shameful how they are treating him.
Sheila Jackson Lee, a longtime Democratic congresswoman from Texas who was an outspoken advocate for Black Americans for decades, has died. She was 74.
“Today, with incredible grief for our loss yet deep gratitude for the life she shared with us, we announce the passing of United States Representative Sheila Jackson Lee of the 18th Congressional District of Texas,” her family said in a statement Friday.
Jackson Lee announced in June that she had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. At the time, she acknowledged that “the road ahead will not be easy” and said she had “faith that God will strengthen me.”
Her family remembered her as “a fierce champion of the people,” saying that “she was affectionately and simply known as ‘Congresswoman’ by her constituents in recognition of her near-ubiquitous presence and service to their daily lives for more than 30 years.”
Born on January 12, 1950, in Queens, New York, Jackson Lee was among the first women to graduate from Yale University and served as a Houston municipal judge and a city councilwoman before she was first elected to represent Texas’ 18th Congressional District in 1994, unseating a Democratic incumbent in the primary for the Houston-area seat.
During her congressional tenure, Jackson Lee was an outspoken advocate for progressive interests and Black Americans. She was one of the sponsors of legislation to establish Juneteenth as a national holiday, frequently spoke out against police brutality and advocated federal legislation to prosecute police misconduct.
She was widely admired among progressives for her opposition to the Iraq War and was a fierce critic of former President Donald Trump. She opposed the tallying of electoral votes certifying Trump as the winner of the 2016 election, citing an unfounded claim about “massive voter suppression,” and occasionally used her position on the House Judiciary Committee to excoriate members of Trump’s circle.
Although she was unsuccessful in some of her most ambitious aims, Jackson Lee remained an advocate for racial justice, particularly in the wake of George Floyd’s killing at the hands of police in 2020.
“We will not stop until the nation knows Black lives matter, and reparations are passed as the most significant civil rights legislation of the 21st century,” Jackson Lee said at a march in Washington in 2020.
At the time of her death, she was a chief deputy whip for House Democrats and a vice chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. She formerly served as whip of the Congressional Black Caucus.
Read the rest at CNN.
On the controversy over the Democratic nomination: The latest effort by anti-Biden Democrats is to force Biden out and then open up the convention to a “mini-primary,” because, as Rep. Zoe Lofgen claims, there shouldn’t be a “coronation” of Vice President Harris. This is insane, IMHO, but supposedly Nancy Pelosi supports this idea.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) joined the growing list of Democrats calling on President Biden to withdraw from the 2024 race Friday, suggesting in an interview that former President’s Obama and Clinton should help vet new candidates for a “mini primary.”
Lofgren joined MSNBC Friday to discuss what would happen if Biden were to decide to step aside — which he has thus far said he would not do — and what she hopes to see happen if someone new were added to the mix.
“Should he make that decision, there will have to be quick steps,” Lofgren said.
“Maybe a vetting hosted by former presidents including Obama and Clinton would be helpful and help focus the attention,” she added later. “And whoever emerges, including Kamala Harris, would be a stronger candidate than if we tried to exclude a transparent public process.”
As the pressure for Biden to drop grows, speculation over whether Vice President Harris would be the nominee if Biden chose to pass the torch and her ability to beat former President Trump in November has as well.
Lofgren, a close ally of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), said she doesn’t think Harris should immediately be named as the nominee, should Biden leave the race. Though, she acknowledged that the vice president would likely have the best shot.
“I don’t think we can do a coronation,” she said. “But obviously, the vice president would be the leading candidate.”
If they pass over Harris, the Democrats had better prepare for large numbers of Black and women voters to be outraged.
In a meeting with fellow California Democrats last week, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi stressed the need for an open process to choose the party’s next nominee if President Joe Biden steps aside, in an effort to avoid the appearance of a Kamala Harris coronation.
The discussion in that meeting of the California delegation, which includes 40 members, took place in the Capitol on July 10, at least partly focused on the complicated next steps for the Democratic Party if Biden left the ticket. And they specifically talked about the potential political downsides of party elites quickly crowning the vice president as the next nominee, according to four people familiar with the discussion, granted anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Pelosi was one of several California Democrats who stressed that an uncompetitive process would turn off voters, according to those four people.
The concern wasn’t about Harris’ strengths as a candidate — and in fact, several people made clear Harris needed to be the party’s next pick — but instead centered on worries that party bosses were choosing the president, rather than the party’s base.
“Nancy was leading that charge that it needed to be an open process,” according to a person briefed on the meeting, who was granted anonymity to avoid blowback from House leadership.
The debate about how to move forward should Biden step aside is unfolding across every level of the Democratic Party, but it’s particularly notable coming from a group effectively led by Pelosi, who has helped spearhead the public and private discussion about Biden’s condition since his disastrous June 27 debate.
Just hours before this California delegation meeting, for instance, Pelosi went on MSNBC for her now-famous remarks suggesting Biden hadn’t made up his mind on reelection and giving cover to fellow Democrats to speak out publicly. And several of Pelosi’s allies from California, led by Rep. Adam Schiff, who will likely soon be a senator for the state, are loudly urging Biden to exit.
The California Democrats are probably the most dependent on Hollywood money and we know that Hollywood donors have rejected Biden.
Interestingly, the Bernie Sanders crowd are supporting Biden.
On Instagram Live early Friday morning, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez discussed the ongoing debate over whether President Biden is fit to run for reelection.
Speaking for close to an hour, the New York progressive explained her support of Biden and why she thought replacing him was a bad idea.
“If you think that there is consensus among the people who want Joe Biden to leave … that they will support Vice President Harris, you would be mistaken,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
Ocasio-Cortez attacked her fellow Democrats who have spoken anonymously to the press about Biden, particularly those resigned to defeat in November.
“My community does not have the option to lose,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “If they’re going to come out and say all their little things on background, off the record, but they’re not going to be fully honest, I’m going to be honest for them. I’m in these rooms. I see what they say in conversations.”
“A lot of them are not just interested in removing the president. They are interested in removing the whole ticket,” Ocasio-Cortez added.
As far as a plan for replacing Biden, Ocasio-Cortez said that whenever she has asked, she hasn’t gotten an answer.
“I have stood up in rooms with all of these people and I have said, ‘Game out your actual plan for me.’ What are the risks of this going to the Supreme Court? And no one had an answer for me.… I’m talking about the lawyers. I’m talking about the legislators,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
She noted that the convention is in less than a month, and that Michigan has to finalize their ballot two days after the convention, which could result in a legal crisis. Ocasio-Cortez said she was concerned that these factors aren’t being considered by Democrats in the replacement camp.
Recent reports say Biden dropping out of the race is increasingly likely, and could happen in a matter of days. The president appears to be strongly considering the idea after meeting with Democratic leaders in the House and Senate, and reportedly even former president Barack Obama thinks Biden needs to reconsider running. A major West Coast donor has already drafted a withdrawal speech.
Watch AOC’s complete statement at TNR.
From ABC News short takes: Donors furious on call with Harris and voter outreach organizers: Sources.
Vice President Kamala Harris tried to calm the panic during a call Friday afternoon with major Democratic donors, and told them, “We are going to win this election,” one attendee on the call told ABC News.
Harris made the call with a person representing a Latino-focused organization and another representing a Black-focused organization, according to a source with knowledge of the call.
Their message was to “plead” to the donors who have been calling on Biden to drop out to stop and resume funding, according to the source.
“We know which candidate in this election puts the American people first: Our President, Joe Biden,” Harris said during the call, according to the attendee.
“With every decision he makes in the Oval Office, he thinks about how it will impact working Americans. And I witness it every day. Now contrast that with what we heard last night.”
The representative of the Latino-focused organization said they have spoken to thousands of people in swing states and out of those thousands of conversations, the debate came up only two times; these average voters were most worried about inflation and the economy.
Harris did not take questions, according to the attendee.
Some donors were furious, with some expecting the call to be about replacing Biden and they did not want to be lectured, the attendee said. As the call was wrapping up, one furious donor started going on a rant and the call ended in the middle of it.
Democrats were caught in an apparent stalemate on Saturday as a dug-in Joe Biden continued to endure high-profile calls to end his re-election campaign after a week of astonishing party moves to unseat the president in favor of a candidate many hope will be more likely to beat Donald Trump.
In the weeks since his disastrous debate performance against Trump, the 81-year-old Biden has attempted to fight off calls for him to step down from the top of the ticket amid concerns that his age and mental acuity are no longer up to the job. But a series of interviews, a press conference and speeches have done little to quell party nerves….
Frustration within the Democratic party establishment at what they see as Biden’s intransigence comes as the outlet also reported on Saturday that the president in private is complaining that former aides to presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton would be lecturing him on election strategy after Democratic 1994 and 2010 midterm election losses that he had avoided in 2022.
Those pressuring Biden – who also has Covid – to abandon his re-election bid, the Times reported, “risk getting his back up and prompting him to remain after all”.
Some advisers are said to believe that Biden is holding out at least until the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, visits Washington on Wednesday. But some donors say that that this is the ideal moment for Biden to step aside now that Republicans have had their convention, and Democrats have a month until their own convention in Chicago to tell a new story about a new candidate.
The vivid picture of a Covid-sick, abandoned and resentful veteran politician, sitting out the pressure in a Delaware beach house, comes as most senior Democrats, including the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, former house speaker Nancy Pelosi and the current speaker, Hakeem Jeffries, are calling for Biden – at a minimum – to reconsider his position.
“We have to cauterize this wound right now and the sooner we can do it the better,” Virginia representative Gerald E Connolly, a Democrat, told the Times. Connolly, who has not publicly called for Biden to step aside, said the ongoing drama “shows the cold calculus of politics”.
The past week has seen waves of Democrat elected officials make public statements of their appreciation of Biden’s record in office but dire warnings that the US will see a second Trump presidency should he remain the party’s candidate for November’s presidential election.
The latest high-profile name to join the chorus was Sherrod Brown, when the embattled Ohio senator broke cover on Friday evening to call for an end to Biden’s re-election campaign.
“I’ve heard from Ohioans on important issues, such as how to continue to grow jobs in our state, give law enforcement the resources to crack down on fentanyl, protect social security and Medicare from cuts, and prevent the ongoing efforts to impose a national abortion ban,” Brown said in a statement.
The biggest problem I see with all this infighting and back-stabbing is that no one is explaining how all this work work. The other problem is that they are trying to disenfranchise the 14,000,000 Americans who voted for Biden in the primaries. I just want to beat Trump, and I don’t see how that can happen if Democrats dump Biden and Harris for a new candidate who will have to raise money, build a campaing infrastructure, introduce him/herself to the country, and fight the lawsuits Republicans are threatening if Biden is removed.
I’m really wiped out, so I’m going give you the rest of the stories I have as links only:
I’m trying very hard not to panic this morning. Ever since the shooting at the Trump rally on Saturday, cable news outlets MSNBC and CNN have completely surrendered to Trump and the Republicans. Both channels are hosting wall-to-wall coverage of the Republican National Convention.
On Monday, MSNBC even took Morning Joe off the air and replaced it with anodyne Today Show-like programming, because they were afraid a host or guest might say something derogatory about Trump. Joe and Mika threatened to quit if it happens again.
MSNBC will not air “Morning Joe,” its celebrated politics roundtable program, on Monday, opting to instead air continued breaking news coverage of the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump.
The progressive news network confirmed the decision to preempt its influential and top-rated morning show after a CNN inquiry Sunday evening. The network said the show will resume airing Tuesday.
The decision by MSNBC to leave one of its most recognizable programs on the sidelines amid a seismic politics-driven news cycle, with the Republican National Convention getting underway in the wake of the Saturday shooting at Trump’s campaign rally, is certain to raise eyebrows.
A person familiar with the matter told CNN that the decision was made to avoid a scenario in which one of the show’s stable of two dozen-plus guests might make an inappropriate comment on live television that could be used to assail the program and network as a whole. Given the breaking news nature of the story, the person said, it made more sense to continue airing rolling breaking news coverage in the fraught political moment.
Morning Joe hosts Mika (formerly Brzezinski) and Joe Scarboro
“Given the gravity and complexity of this unfolding story, NBC News, NBC News NOW and MSNBC have remained in rolling breaking news coverage since Saturday evening,” a spokesperson for NBCUniversal News Group said in a statement to CNN. “As we continue to cover this story into the week, the networks will continue to cross simulcast, alternating between NBC News, NBC News NOW and ‘MSNBC Reports,’ so there is one news feed covering this developing situation.”
In the wake of the attempt on Trump’s life, some of the former president’s supporters have vehemently criticized the press and liberal media commentators for their hard-knuckled reporting, which has sounded the alarm on what four more years under the former president would look like.
Cesar Conde, the chairman of NBCUniversal News Group, made the decision in conjunction with Rashida Jones, the president of MSNBC, and hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, the person familiar with the matter told CNN.
MSNBC “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough slammed his own network for pulling his show on Monday in favor of news coverage of the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, saying he and co-host Mika Brzezinski were “surprised” and “disappointed” by the call and threatening to leave if it happens again.
“Next time we are told there will be a news feed replacing us, we will be in our chairs,” Scarborough said live on air Tuesday morning. “And the news feed will be us, or they can get somebody else to host the show.”
Scarborough said the network told the “Morning Joe” team that there would be one NBC News feed “in breaking news mode” across all NBC channels all day Monday. But the “Today” show aired on Monday morning on NBC, and MSNBC hosts Andrea Mitchell and Chris Jansing appeared for their regularly scheduled shows in the afternoon.
“If we had known that there wasn’t going to be the one news feed from NBC News across all NBC News channels … we obviously would have been in yesterday morning,” Scarborough said, later adding: “Our team was not given a good answer as to why that didn’t happen, but it didn’t happen.”
Trump with his massive bandage.
Despite the heavy coverage, no one seems to be asking questions about what actually happened on Saturday. What kind of injury did Trump have? If he was actually grazed by an AR-15 bullet, it seems as if it would have done more damage than is apparent in photographs. Originally, local police said he was hit by fragments of the teleprompter. Trump went to the golf course on Sunday; he wasn’t wearing a bandage and his ear looked normal. Now he’s wearing a large “maxi-pad” at the convention. Here are a few Twitter comments on the subject:
You would think someone would inquire about Trump’s medical report if for no other reason than Trump has not provided any medical updates or information, neither has the hospital that treated him. Outside of Trump telling us he’s “fine”, how severe was the wound? Did he loose part of his ear (bullets do terrible things to flesh)? How long for recovery? Will the wound require cosmetic surgery? What about reports that it may not have been a bullet which wounded him but glass from the shattered teleprompter? If I missed such reports from his campaign or the hospital please post. Thank you.
Feel free to point me to the magic trajectory that would allow for a through-and-through of a person’s ear from a location lateral to them. Show me your expertise in… basic geometry.
Hi. A round from an AR wouldn’t poke a little hole in an ear. Trump didn’t get shot. He was injured by shrapnel or shattered glass or something.
Josh Marshall
@joshtpm
We shouldn’t have to speculate abt any of this. It is the most basic thing for law enforcement and or the medical team that examined Trump to say what they found. It’s such a basic thing. It’s a huge story. How can it be that there’s zero official abt this part of it?
AR-15 bullets
This man is running for president. Shouldn’t we get more details about what happened? And why aren’t we getting more information about the shooter? Ever since it came out that he was a Republican, no one seems to want to talk about him. Maybe if the FBI can break into his phone, we will learn something.
Former President Donald Trump’s son, Eric Trump, said his father doesn’t have stitches after he was shot in an assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania over the weekend, but that he has a “nice flesh wound” from the shooting.
The former president could be seen touching his ear as the attack unfolded, before he was shielded by Secret Service and whisked off the rally stage with blood on his face. When he appeared at the Republican National Convention on Monday and Tuesday, he wore a large bandage over his injury.
Speaking to “CBS Mornings” co-host Tony Dokoupil from the convention in Milwaukee Wednesday morning, Eric Trump said his father has referred to the injury as “the greatest earache he’s ever had.”
“You know, he was millimeters away from having his life expunged … I’m sure the ear doesn’t feel well,” Eric Trump said.
Eric Trump also told “CBS Evening News” anchor and managing editor Norah O’Donnell on Tuesday that his father’s hearing is fine and that he is “in great spirits.
The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general said Wednesday it has opened an investigation into the Secret Service’s handling of security for former President Donald Trump on the day a gunman tried to assassinate him at a Pennsylvania rally.
In a brief notice posted to the inspector general’s website, the agency said the objective of the probe is to “Evaluate the United States Secret Service’s (Secret Service) process for securing former President Trump’s July 13, 2024 campaign event.”
There was no date given for when the investigation was launched. The notice was among a long list of ongoing cases that the inspector general’s office is pursuing.
President Joe Biden already had directed an independent review of the security at the rally.
The shooting has raised questions about how the gunman was able to climb onto a roof with a clear line of sight to the former president, who said he was shot in the ear.
The 20-year-old shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was able to get within 135 meters (157 yards) of the stage where the Republican former president was speaking when he opened fire. That’s despite a threat on Trump’s life from Iran leading to additional security for the former president in the days before the Saturday rally.
We’re learning more about the movements of Thomas Matthew Crooks before Saturday’s shooting at the rally for former President Donald Trump.
New video obtained exclusively by Pittsburgh’s Action News 4 appears to show 20-year-old Thomas Crooks lurking in the area an hour before he opened fire.
The man, who didn’t want to show his face on camera, captured the video at 5:06 p.m. on Saturday evening. He says it was a seemingly simply moment as he was trying to capture the size of the crowd, but ended up capturing much more.
“I wanted to pan the crowd because it was a massive crowd, so I was just taking in the moment. So this was before the shooting. Obviously had no idea how that day, how that day would end,” said the man who attended the rally with his teenaged son.
The video appears to show Crooks, 20, lurking in the area near a building just past the secured perimeter of the event itself. As it pans to the crowd, it shows multiple law enforcement vehicles in the area facing the building itself. As the video moves back toward the building, Crooks appears to be seen again. This means that Crooks was likely in the area for more than an hour before the shots were fired….
Pittsburgh’s Action News 4 has learned from multiple sources that Crooks was spotted at the rally, photographed as suspicious and officers were actively looking for him when he made his way onto the roof.
Law enforcement sources say Crooks was able to access the roof by climbing over an air conditioning unit adjacent to the building.
DC Democrats are still fighting each other over whether Biden should be their nominee. This has been going on for 3 weeks now. No one ever explains how replacing him would work. All of the suggested replacements are polling worse than Biden, and are unknown to the average voter who doesn’t follow politics closely. Many of these “insiders” who want to replace Biden also want to dump Kamala Harris. That would guarantee losing black and women voters who are the base of the party.
President Joe Biden spent more than a week in meetings and on phone calls addressing Democrats’ concerns about his candidacy with a positive, conciliatory message about his path forward. At times, he even sounded contrite about his uneven debate performance, which prompted calls for him to suspend his re-election campaign.
He took blunt questions about his mental acuity in stride. He smiled through suggestions from allies that he take a cognitive test or consider allowing someone younger to take his place on the Democratic ticket. He agreed that his supporters have legitimate concerns and promised to show them he’s up for the rigor of a presidential campaign and another four years in the White House.
Then he’d had enough.
In the past few days, Biden has started to privately convey a new message to Democrats: The conversation about my future is over, and I’m getting irritated that you’re not realizing that. Biden has called several prominent allies individually to tell them to spread the word.
“We think we’ve got a good plan to fight through this,” a senior Biden aide said.
Nearly three weeks since his rocky debate performance that shook his party, Biden is intent on shutting down dissent among Democrats in order to move forward and focus on defeating Donald Trump. And after hearing out his critics, he’s tightening his circle to those he‘s relied on the longest — and who support his path ahead.
Biden’s thinning patience for questions about his candidacy were on display as he campaigned Friday in Detroit telling a large, effusive crowd: “You made me the nominee. No one else. Not the press, not the pundits, not the insiders, not donors.”
“And I’m not going anywhere,” Biden added.
Read more DC gossip at the NBC link.
Biden did make some news this morning. He is working on changes to the Supreme Court.
It’s hard to know the precise combination of developments that changed President Biden’s mind about Supreme Court reforms and prompted him to place them more centrally in the framework of the 2024 election.
Was it the ethics scandals of Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito and the Supreme Court’s own ineptitude in dealing with them? Was it the series of controversial decisions across a whole host of issues and areas of civic life in which the court wrested power away from the executive and legislative branches and placed it firmly in the judicial branch? Was it the six-justice conservative majority aggressively uprooting the court’s own precedents in pursuit of its own preferred legal and policy outcomes? Was it the fact that he’s trailing in the polls with his own re-election more at risk that at any previous point in his presidency?
All of the above are in play, of course. A tipping point was reached, and it’s unlikely any one development was the difference-maker.
The shift, first reported by the Washington Post, was revealed over the weekend in a call Biden had with the Congressional Progressive Caucus:
“I’m going to need your help on the Supreme Court, because I’m about to come out — I don’t want to prematurely announce it — but I’m about to come out with a major initiative on limiting the court. … I’ve been working with constitutional scholars for the last three months, and I need some help,” Biden said, according to a transcript of the call obtained by The Washington Post.
The NYT separately confirmed that Biden’s “proposals to overhaul the court … could be unveiled in the coming weeks.”
Among the menu of choices Biden is reported to be considering:
term limits for the justices;
imposing an enforceable ethics code; and
Relatedly, backing a constitutional amendment to reverse the effect of the Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity.
Late addition: I meant to note that enlarging the court beyond its current nine-justice setup does not appear to be among Biden’s proposals.
None of these measures will pass the GOP-controlled House, though they could serve as messaging vehicles on the Hill between now and the election. More importantly, they elevate Supreme Court reforms to his second term agenda, creating the opportunity for the November election to be a referendum on the high court and create legislative momentum if Biden wins. Even then, it’ll be a very heavy lift.
This is a long-game move, that also offers a few short-term political advantages.
Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, applaud on Tuesday.
Yesterday’s big news was that Trump has chosen JD Vance as his running mate. It appears this is going to be a controversial choice. We will be writing more about him in the days to come, but here are a few relevant articles:
Donald Trump’s choice of JD Vance as his vice-presidential pick has reignited fears in Europe that he would pursue a transactional “America first” foreign policy that could culminate in the US pushing for Ukraine to acquiesce to Vladimir Putin and sue for peace with Russia.
“It’s bad for us but it’s terrible news for [Ukraine],” said one senior European diplomat in Washington. “[Vance] is not our ally.”
Foreign diplomats and observers have frequently called Trump’s actual policies a “black box,” saying that was impossible to know for certain what the unpredictable leader would do when in power.
Some have soothed themselves by suggesting that names tipped for top positions, such as former national security adviser Robert O’Brien, would maintain a foreign policy status quo while Trump focuses on domestic affairs.
But a prospective Trump administration now has a much more energetic surrogate who will fuel Trump’s skepticism towards Ukraine and Europe, while urging on the party’s aggressive trade and foreign policy elsewhere around the globe.
“Senator Vance was one of the leading opponents of the new assistance package to Ukraine last spring and has expressed indifference to what happens in that war,” said Michael McFaul, director at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a former ambassador to Russia. “By choosing Vance as his running mate, Trump has clarified a very clear choice for American voters in November on foreign policy.”
“President Biden’s foreign policy strategy radically contrasts with Mr Trump’s approach,” he said. “Biden and Harris have promoted democracy and stood up to autocrats. Trump and Vance have paid no attention to advancing democracy abroad and instead have embraced autocrats. The contrast in foreign approaches embraced by these two presidential candidates has never been clearer in my lifetime.”
Former President Donald Trump didn’t just select a running mate here – he doused political kerosene on the raging Republican fire over foreign policy.
By tapping the 39-year-old Sen. J.D. Vance, one of the party’s leading national security doves, Trump strengthened the hand of the isolationist forces eager to undo the hawkish GOP consensus that has endured since the Reagan era.
Should Trump prevail in November, the non-interventionists will have one of their most articulate advocates at Trump’s side. What worries the hawks is that Vance may also be the last adviser in the former president’s ear.
While toeing the party line and praising Vance in their public comments, in private the interventionists ranged from horrified to merely alarmed that one of the loudest critics of aiding Ukraine could soon be first in line for the presidency. The grimaces, sighs and whispered frustrations from the old guard as they made their way through the convention reception circuit were easy to find in the day after the selection.
Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Calif.), who oversees military spending as the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee chair, told one associate,according to a person familiar with the exchange: “The Ukrainians better hurry up and win.”
Another influential congressional Republican simply told me about the Vance selection: “I’m scared to death.”
While he had it on before Trump announced his running mate, the Ukrainian flag pin on the lapel of Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), the ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee, neatly illustrated without the necessity of words the gulf between so much of the GOP and Vance on the war in Europe.
Read the rest at Politico.
JD Vance with his wife Usha during his Senate campaign.
Some racist Republicans are unhappy with the Vance choice, because he is married to a woman of color.
Extremist figures and members of the Make America Great Again movement have criticized the wife of Ohio Senator JD Vance after former President Donald Trump named him as his running mate in the 2024 election.
Usha Vance, the daughter of Indian immigrants, was raised in San Diego before meeting her husband at Yale Law School. They were married in 2014 and later blessed by a Hindu pundit in a separate ceremony, The New York Times reported.
In the wake of Trump’s vice presidential announcement on Monday, numerous conservative and far-right figures have taken to social media to launch racist attacks against Usha Vance because of her Indian heritage and the assumption that her influence on her husband’s political career means the Republican Party will be softer on immigration.
“I’m sure this guy is going to be great on immigration,” Jaden McNeil, a far-right activist and the founder of America First Students, wrote on X, formerly Twitter, while sharing a picture of the Vances with their newborn baby.
Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist who visited Trump at his Mar-a-Lago home along with rapper Kanye West in November 2022, suggested that Vance would not be a “defender of white identity” because of his wife’s Indian heritage.
“Who is this guy, really?” Fuentes said on his podcast. “Do we really expect that the guy who has an Indian wife and named their kid Vivek is going to support white identity?”
Vincent James Foxx, who was present at the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, wrote on X: “JD Vance gets tapped as VP and immediately there’s a Hindu prayer at the RNC. Next we’ll see Sen. Mike Lee and JD Vance team up to convince Trump to let in 10 million Indian immigrants. Green cards on diplomas!”
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.
How about we use that $45 million plus whatever it costs to undo the damage Washington D.C. roads to fund the Veterans’ services cut by that ugly budget winding its way to the Senate today? Economist Paul Krugman–
Here’s some analysis of the late-night passage of the bill on the 
Steven Beschloss calls for more activism today at his substack,
The Financial Markets are reeling.
The market has yet to fully absorb the Treasury Bond Dump by China. This is from the
That means our exports will go down in many of the countries. It’s damned recessionary. Also, if the price of bonds goes down because a country dumps their portfolio of treasuries, the interest rates go up. It will be truly interesting to see what the Fed does with this. Then there’s this. I bet Senator Warren is apoplectic. This report comes from 
I just want to wish Former President the best as he struggles with cancer. I know how that feels. I’m 35 years out from a stage 4 cancer episode. It transforms how you see time. 
Reuters: Exclusive: 
Hillary Clinton speaks for herself at The New York Times this morning: 
Noah Berlatsky at Public Notice: 
The Democrats who thought the risks sat with the candidate got their way when Biden dropped out. Those who feared chaos are getting their way now, as the party rallies around Harris and avoids an open primary. It’s not how I would have chosen to do things, but there’s nevertheless a lot to recommend it.
You probably heard about the Fortune scoop yesterday about Elon Musk donating to Trump. The story is behind a paywall, but here’s the gist from The Guardian: 
The contrast stands not only with her boss but with her new opponent. It isn’t just Biden who has to limit public appearances, lest he get tired and cranky. Donald Trump, at age 78, has also been mostly absent from the traditional campaign rigamarole. He goes to occasional rallies, where his fans swoon over him, but which get relatively little press. There’s no incentive to cover his usual incoherent stump speech because he doesn’t break any news. He gives interviews to right-wing outlets, which mostly ask him how he got to be so darn perfect while avoiding topics that might draw interest from the larger public. He unloads his far-right venom on Truth Social, but since most journalists ignore that, he might as well be blogging into the void. He golfs a lot and, of course, had to sit in the untelevised trial in May, which resulted in 34 felony convictions. But to average Americans, especially swing voters who will decide the race, Trump is mostly out of sight and out of mind. 
I’m not sure how much I can post today. I’m down with a bad cold and I’m barely functioning. I did test for Covid and the result was negative. I’m not coughing, so I think it’s just a head cold.
On the controversy over the Democratic nomination: The latest effort by anti-Biden Democrats is to force Biden out and then open up the convention to a “mini-primary,” because, as Rep. Zoe Lofgen claims, there shouldn’t be a “coronation” of Vice President Harris. This is insane, IMHO, but supposedly Nancy Pelosi supports this idea.
The discussion in that meeting of the California delegation, which includes 40 members, took place in the Capitol on July 10, at least partly focused on the complicated next steps for the Democratic Party if Biden left the ticket. And they specifically talked about the potential political downsides of party elites quickly crowning the vice president as the next nominee, according to four people familiar with the discussion, granted anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Ocasio-Cortez attacked her fellow Democrats who have spoken anonymously to the press about Biden, particularly those resigned to 
Frustration within the Democratic party establishment at what they see as Biden’s intransigence comes as the outlet also reported on Saturday that the president in private is complaining that former aides to presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton would be lecturing him on election strategy after Democratic 1994 and 2010 midterm election losses that he had avoided in 2022.
DC Democrats are still fighting each other over whether Biden should be their nominee. This has been going on for 3 weeks now. No one ever explains how replacing him would work. All of the suggested replacements are polling worse than Biden, and are unknown to the average voter who doesn’t follow politics closely. Many of these “insiders” who want to replace Biden also want to dump Kamala Harris. That would guarantee losing black and women voters who are the base of the party.
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