“Come on, Mr. President. Just do it!” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
The DNC begins today in Chicago. It’s a busy schedule of what’s ahead for the future, but tonight’s focus will be on President Joe Biden’s long record of public service. Here’s the line-up of events and speakers.
This is from Axios. “DNC lineup: Who’s speaking and what to expect.”
Driving the news: Convention organizers released night-by-night themes and speaker details on Sunday morning. One speaker who’s not on the official agenda but Axios has confirmed will take the stage on Tuesday: former First Lady Michelle Obama.
Monday, “For the People”: Biden and Dr. Jill Biden speak, along with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a welcome from Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson.
Tuesday, “A Bold Vision for America’s Future”: Former President Obama plus second gentleman Doug Emhoff, with a welcome from Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker.
Wednesday, “A Fight for Our Freedoms”: Vice presidential nominee Tim Walz delivers his acceptance speech, preceded by former President Clinton, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg (per CNN).
Thursday, “For Our Future”: Harris accepts the convention’s nomination for president.
Other speakers include Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
Former President Carter’s grandson, Jason Carter, is expected to speak on behalf of his grandfather, who has said he hopes to stay alive long enough to vote for Harris.
Sneak peek: The stairs at the delegate entrancewill say “History Is In Your Hands” — a quote from Biden’s Oval Office address on July 24.
As delegates arrive on Monday ahead of Biden’s speech, digital signage in the United Center will say: “History is in your hands” and “Spread the faith.”
Robert Reich sums up what I feel about Biden’s four years. I was beginning my career as an economist when Ronald Reagan took over. I was working in a highly regulated banking industry about to be turned loose. Eventually, my first home had a fixed rate of 16.7%, which my employment turned into 12%. That’s just one of the nightmare stories I have to tell students.
I attended schools that produced ‘freshwater’ economists, which is a term that basically describes us as not coming from either coast, likely public university educated, and by no means radical. During that time, I lived through two recessions that took out my nascent savings and investment portfolio. I realized that the radical policy was not coming from the Democratic Party.
By the time I found out about the Iran-Contra affair, I was ready to vote for Bill Clinton. I didn’t lose much in the “Great Recession” because I knew another Republican meant another economic roller-coaster ride. The last Reagan recession took out most of my parents’ retirement savings, but they didn’t want to discuss why. If you know how to use derivatives, and that’s where hedge fund managers come in, you can make money in any economy. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been very accessible to regular folks until recently.
My oldest Kansas City Cousin and her husband graduated from Ivy League Schools, Princeton and Vassar. One time, when I was in high school, they drove to buy a car from Dad’s Ford Dealership in Iowa. My dad gave them the usual family price. I was their flower girl at their wedding and spent much of my young life with my Kansas City family. I adored them.
Her lawyer husband told me that the only way to grow an economy was to give massive tax cuts to the wealthy to start businesses, which would create jobs. I can’t remember exactly what started that conversation. Although, I must have said something outside of the orthodox Republican Policy Bible at the time. It sounded logical but seemed too good to be true when I started thinking about it. I’ve never gotten the chance to tell him that it doesn’t work, will never work, and actually works worse than anyone ever thought now that I’ve got my doctorate in Financial Economics, worked at the Fed, and taught and researched economics and finance since 1980. I now have the chops and the proof of why all that does is create chaos in the overall economy and siphon public funds to people who don’t need any more wealth.
I’m not sure why people fondly remember the Reagan years, but they were not economic good times. Also, I found out the Republicans will run up huge deficits as long as the rich or defense contractors get the results of whatever happened to create them. Trickle-down economics is even more of a failure with all the incentives now of not taxing capital gains and giving tax breaks for basically stock market gambling. The rich do not put their gains into actual industry anymore. They keep rolling it into the stock market, and then they’re great consumers of things like gigantic German Yachts and all kinds of goodies that mess up our trade balance. I voted for Bill Clinton because his policy came from economists and worked. Reagan was the one who put taxes on tips, unemployment, and Social Security. He had to make huge tax increases to compensate for the huge deficit with the 1981 tax cuts. So, from 1982 to 1993, there were huge tax cuts, including some from “Read My Lips” by HW Bush. Weirdly, undoing the taxes on tips and Social Security that Trump is high on is basically removing Reagan’s economic legacy.
But enough of that rant … on to the Reich commentary.
Tonight’s opening of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago will be an opportunity for the Democratic Party and the nation to take stock of Joe Biden’s term of office and thank him for his service.
He still has five months to go as president, of course, but the baton has been passed.
Biden’s singular achievement has been to change the economic paradigm that reigned since Reagan and return to one that dominated public life between 1933 and 1980 — and is far superior to the one that has prevailed since.
Biden’s democratic capitalism is neither socialism nor “big government.” It is, rather, a return to an era when government organized the market for the greater good.
The Great Crash of 1929 followed by the Great Depression taught the nation a crucial lesson that we forgot after Reagan’s presidency: markets are human creations. The economy that collapsed in 1929 was the consequence of allowing nearly unlimited borrowing, encouraging people to gamble on Wall Street, and permitting the Street to take huge risks with other people’s money.
Franklin D. Roosevelt and his administration reversed this. They stopped the looting of America. They also gave Americans a modicum of economic security. During World War II, they put almost every American to work.
Subsequent Democratic and Republican administrations enlarged and extended democratic capitalism. Wall Street was regulated, as were television networks, airlines, railroads, and other common carriers. CEO pay was modest. Taxes on the highest earners financed public investments in infrastructure (such as the national highway system) and higher education.
America’s postwar industrial policy spurred innovation. The Department of Defense and its Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration developed satellite communications, container ships, and the internet. The National Institutes of Health did trailblazing basic research in biochemistry, DNA, and infectious diseases.
Public spending rose during economic downturns to encourage hiring. Antitrust enforcers broke up AT&T and other monopolies. Small businesses were protected from giant chain stores. Labor unions thrived. By the 1960s, a third of all private-sector workers were unionized. Large corporations sought to be responsive to all their stakeholders.
But then America took a giant U-turn. The OPEC oil embargo of the 1970s brought double-digit inflation followed by Fed Chair Paul Volcker’s effort to “break the back” of it by raising interest rates so high that the economy fell into deep recession.
All of which prepared the ground for Reagan’s war on democratic capitalism. From 1981 onward, a new bipartisan orthodoxy emerged that markets functioned well only if the government got out of the way.
The goal of economic policy thereby shifted from the common good to economic growth, even though Americans already well-off gained most from that growth. And the means shifted from public oversight of the market to deregulation, free trade, privatization, “trickle-down” tax cuts, and deficit reduction — all of which helped the monied interests make even more money.
If you notice the last two Republican administrations with the emphasis on the last one, there were very few real economists who advised the President. Trump only had one with the creds but was considered insane by his peers because he fitted his papers to a political take rather than data analysis and the usual scientific method.
No matter what party you’re in, and I know Bernanke, Mankiw, Greenspan, and Krugman feel this way, the facts are the facts. Concentrating fiscal policy on Main Street and the middle and working classes is the best use of tax dollars to keep the engine of economic growth steadily growing. Biden’s stewardship of the economy has proved this. He also provided input on the Obama administration’s cleanup of the huge mess called “The Great Recession,” which was completely on the back of bad policy and lack of oversight regarding the financial economy. I am a Financial Economist. We know enough to know that these things should not happen if it wasn’t the habit of Pols to go after Dark Money and then vote to install bad policy into law. It’s also disheartening to see it on the Supreme Court, where Dark Money has completely corrupted at least two Judges.
And the crazy thing is we’re back to being called Communists again which, like capitalism, is a Marxist theoretical abstract that cannot work, has never worked, and has never actually been implemented anywhere. We live in mixed market economies, and their characteristics determine what kind of oversight they require. You cannot compare a market where there are only two providers, like airplane manufacturing and Boeing and Airbus, with the market for apples. There have never been any economies where the government owns all the production factors. The Soviet Style system was called a command economy. Even the Chinese have given up on the planned command economy and the Cubans have many markets based on private ownership. It’s not just the major ones. I can’t believe we’re back to red-baiting.
The most interesting trivia I have for you today is that Donald J. Harris, Kamala’s father, is a bona fide Emeritus Economics Professor at Stanford. His research is primarily in developing economies. He published a book in 1978, “Capital Accumulation and Income Distribution,” which relies heavily on the new statistical methods that were developing at the time and takes the field from political philosophy to using scientific methods and data to see what works! That’s my kind of pragmatism. You wonder what kind of talk the Harris family had at the dinner table.
So, while this shindig in Chicago gets going, watch the week for Trump’s further insane adventures for attention. Unfortunately, he usually succeeds at getting press attention even when it’s not newsworthy or basically a rant of a senile old man stuck in the 1980s. People need to know how bad it was 4 years ago with COVID-19 unassailed by policy and treated with denial. We are the strongest economy in the world with the strongest growth. Economists were prepared to see China become the number one economy shortly, but it’s not because of this administration’s policy. Inflation is back within normal parameters. That’s not to say there are not people who still aren’t seeing the benefits. But Kamala’s policy announcement last Friday was full of suggestions to get everyone back on track. The answer to folks left behind is not in the Project 2025 Playbook. (See BB’s post on Saturday for coverage of the Harris/Walz economic priorities in her Caturday Post.)
David R Lurie, who is writing for Public Notice, writes, “Trump’s carny act isn’t working anymore. His Folgers Coffee™ Conference showed a candidate in decline. I’m sure the DNC productions will have much better production chops, pithy content, and actual policy presentation.
Last Thursday, Donald Trump held a “press conference” outside a building in his Bedminster country club in New Jersey, done up with many American flags so as to vaguely resemble the White House.
Trump rambled on astride a tableau of groceries, ranging from brightly toned condiments and a Wheaties™ box (bearing the image of Billie Jean King) to tubs of Folgers Coffee™ (caff and decaf) and packages of sausage and bacon that lay roasting in the midsummer heat.
Trump’s team also assembled a chorus, apparently composed of club visitors, that cheered and jeered during the “news conference” when needed.
Simply put, it was quite a weird scene.
The event was all the more bizarre because Trump hardly referred to (or even acknowledged) the cornucopia of processed food arrayed around him during his typically lengthy and meandering rant before the assembled press corps.
Presumably, the food had been intended to serve as a prop for a “policy” discussion of inflation. Trump, however, spent most of his time in front of the cameras deriding Kamala Harris’s intelligence and appearance, and insisting that he’s “entitled” to “personally attack” her, because, as Trump explained, she unfairly labeled him “weird.”
To borrow an old ad meme, where’s the beef? Well, it was sitting on the table at that presser, rotting in the sun. That’s quite a metaphor for what’s happening with the DonOld/JD show. JD’s rallies look like the Time Out Room for bad behavior. And no one can take 90 minutes of Trump’s senile ramblings on sharks, batteries, and how much better he looks than Harris.
Democrats gathered in Chicago this week for their national convention will highlight the threat to democracy that they say former President Donald Trump poses, giving prominent speaking roles to lawmakers, as well as to a Capitol Police officer injured during the January 6, 2021, riots.
An official with Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign told CNN that among those speakers are Reps. Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, who both served on the House select committee to investigate the January 6 insurrection. That committee ultimately recommended in its 2022 report that Trump be barred from holding office again.
Retired St. Aquilino Gonell, one of the Capitol Police officers injured during the January 6 attack, will also address the convention. Since responding to the attack on the US Capitol over three years ago, Gonell has become a public face of the insurrection’s toll and a vocal critic of Trump and the Republicans who continue to defend him.
“Donald Trump’s failure to denounce the violence on January 6, 2021 is a betrayal to every officer who put their life on the line that day — and to every veteran who risked everything to defend our country,” Gonell, who is supporting Harris, said in a statement provided to CNN. “You cannot say you back the police or the Constitution if you’re offering pardons to criminals who tried to destroy our democracy, hurt our leaders and attack law enforcement.”
Former Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, who also served on the January 6 committee, is scheduled to address the convention Thursday, CNN previously reported. Kinzinger, who is now a CNN political commentator, was one of 10 House Republicans to vote for Trump’s impeachment for “incitement of an insurrection” in relation to his role during the attack on the Capitol.
The so-called Tennessee Three — state Reps. Justin Jones, Justin Pearson and Gloria Johnson — are also expected to speak at the convention. Jones and Pearson were expelled from the Tennessee House last year after the three lawmakers led a gun control protest on the chamber floor. They have since won reelection.
Also scheduled to speak during the week, according to the campaign official, are Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas, who served in the state Legislature in 2021 when Democrats sought to block restrictive voting legislation in the state, and Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock, who serves as pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. served.
Before dropping out of the 2024 race, President Joe Biden made the argument that Trump posed a threat to democracy a driving feature of his candidacy.
“Anita Dunn says Joe Biden’s speech is about looking forward, not back. “This is not a time for legacy,” the longtime Biden aide said on CNN.” This analysis can be found at Politico. It’s written by Irrie Sentner.
Anita Dunn is looking to the future — and says President Joe Biden is, too.
The former senior Biden adviser, who left the White House last month to work with the Future Forward super PAC supporting Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign, said on CNN today that Biden in his speech will make a “resounding argument for why Kamala Harris should be elected president in 2024.” She joked that he is now Harris’ “volunteer in chief.”
Tonight’s speech will cap off a half-century political career for the president. But, Dunn said, it won’t be about looking back.
“This is not a time for legacy,” Dunn said. “This is a time for arguing why Kamala Harris is the best candidate.”
Biden will be speaking to a party that pushed him to drop his reelection bid — and endorsing a candidate the party has since rallied around. Those intraparty tensions are still playing out at the DNC.
Well, it’s bound to be much better than whatever the Republicans put on. I remember turning off Pat Buchanan’s racist rant in his Culture Wars speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention and was glad I didn’t attend in person. The state convention was weird enough and overrun with what we now call White Christian Nationalists. Because even though I was running as a Republican at the time, it was another one of those things that made me vote for Clinton. I could tell then that there was no saving the Republican Party. I was an Independent for a long time.
So, I’m certain there will be a lot going on that won’t include all that anger and bigotry of the other! Stay tuned! You may exit the Rabbit Hole now!
An icy winter storm marched across Massachusetts Friday, pushing temperatures well below freezing and leading to hundreds of car crashes on slick roadways, including one fatality, officials said.
State Police said they had responded to over 200 crashes, starting from about 5 p.m. Thursday, when the temperatures started to drop, through Friday afternoon.
“Patrols were going from one crash to another,” State Police said on Twitter.
A Worcester man was killed in a crash with a tractor trailer on Interstate 495 north in Chelmsford, State Police said.
Boston police responded to 48 crashes across the city between 7 a.m. and 5 p.m. Friday, according to Sergeant Detective John Boyle, the department’s chief spokesman.
Elsewhere, a car overturned on Route 2 eastbound in Belmont and caught fire around 5 p.m., but there were no injuries, local police said.
There was little hope conditions would improve anytime soon on Friday evening.
A winter weather advisory remained in effect until 10 p.m. for much of Massachusetts, all of Rhode Island, and northern Connecticut, according to the National Weather Service.
Today the temperatures remain below zero. I’m so glad I don’t need to go anywhere.
About six months after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, Erin Smith was talking to a psychiatrist who was working on a report on her husband’s death. Jeffrey Smith, an officer with the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, had died by suicide on Jan. 15, just nine days after the attack on the Capitol.
The psychiatrist, hired by a lawyer for Jeffrey’s estate, was examining whether the injuries Jeffrey suffered on Jan. 6 had caused his death. Erin didn’t know precisely what her husband had gone through on Jan. 6; the couple had a general understanding that they wouldn’t get into too many specifics about his police work. But from what he did share, it was awful.
Cat from Alien
“He internalized things. He said it was the worst day of his life,” Erin told the psychiatrist. “He said, you train all the time but it’s different when you experience it. I’d never seen him that way before. He was extremely even tempered. He was very calm about everything.”
When officers heard over the radio that shots were fired, Jeffrey told her, they didn’t know whether it was rioters or police who were shooting. Jeffrey, according to the psychiatrist’s subsequent report, told another friend that his adrenaline was pumping like crazy and called the scene “crazy.”
“We were literally in the halls of the Capitol pushing people out,” Jeffrey reportedly texted the friend. “It was like a movie.” [….]
“He didn’t know the layout of the Capitol. The last time he was in the Capitol was when he was 10 years old,” Erin said. “He didn’t know if he was going to get out alive.”
Erin recalled to the psychiatrist that Jeffrey told her when he arrived home that he’d been “punched in the face, hit in the head with a metal pole.”
Erin had to fight get any information from the Metropolitan Police, but she did get some help from on-line investigators where were able to locate Jeffrey in videos. She was eventually aespeble to get his body cam footage through a lawsuit. What that footage revealed was horrifying. Reilly has a long thread on Twitter that everyone should read (including Merrick Garland). Here’s some of what Jeffrey experience on January 6, 2021.
But there’s more to this story–the tale of a Washington DC chiropractor named David Walls-Kaufman, who was outed to HuffPo by a client, who asked to be called “Elizabeth.”
About this time a year ago, a woman who agreed to be identified by HuffPost as Elizabeth was stressed. So, not long after the Jan. 6 attack, she went to see her chiropractor on Capitol Hill at his shop on East Capitol Street, barely 500 yards from the Capitol grounds….
Elizabeth had been going to the chiropractor for years. She shared a bit of what brought her to see him that day, perhaps thinking that a man so close to the Capitol who had clients who worked on the Hill might have similar feelings of unease in the aftermath of a violent mob’s attempt to stop the transfer of power in the United States.
“I said I had been stressed out and upset and scared by the attack on the Capitol,” Elizabeth told HuffPost. But, with her chiropractor’s hands on her body, she realized he had a very different perspective.
“While he was adjusting me, he said, ‘I thought it was just a few broken windows,’” Elizabeth said.
Vito’s cat from The Godfather
It turns out that Walls-Kaufmann was one of the rioters in the Capitol building and he appears in Jeffrey Smith’s body cam footage. You can see shots of him in the article and in Reilly’s Twitter thread.
Members of the sleuthing group Deep State Dogs, who began a volunteer investigative effort for Jeffrey’s widow after her attorney reached out to HuffPost, confirmed Walls-Kaufman’s identity. Nearly six months after he was identified, he has not yet been arrested.
HuffPost also recently discovered how Walls-Kaufman entered the Capitol on Jan. 6. Newly released surveillance footage from the Capitol shows Walls-Kaufman, with his hoodie on his head, barreling through the building’s eastern doors, which are visible from the street outside his shop. He enters the Capitol seconds after a member of the mob violently pulls down a cop from behind and the mob rushes in. Another officer, wearing no protective gear, has to hurry over to help the fallen officer, and the mob surges through the doors. That’s when Walls-Kaufman rushes in, right behind Capitol riot defendants Simone Gold and John Strand, who ― like Walls-Kaufman ― promote conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 pandemic.
I’ve quoted a great deal from Reilly’s article, but there is much more to read at the HuffPo link. This is such an important story.
As we learned yesterday, the Republican National Committee thinks the people who marched on the capitol after Trump incited them were just “ordinary citizens who engaged in legitimate political discourse.” RNC chair Ronna McDaniel tried to clean the mess up on Twitter, but no one’s buying it.
McDaniel in a tweet on Friday said that she has repeatedly condemned the violence on January 6. The resolution contained no mention of the violence and criminal acts by Trump loyalists during the riot.
Democrats, historians, and democracy experts, among others, ripped into the Republican party for framing the deadly riot in this way.
Mr. Bigglesworth from Austin Powers
“Today @GOPChairwoman said Jan 6th insurrectionists were ‘ordinary citizens who engaged in legitimate political discourse,'” Jaime Harrison, chair of the Democratic National Committee, said in a tweet. “They stormed the Capitol. Threatened the VP & Speaker. Injured police. Broke windows. Smeared feces on walls. GOP is truly the Party of #FraudFearFascism.”
Walter Shaub, a former director of the Office of Government Ethics, said the “deadly insurrection that sought to stop the transfer of power was not ‘legitimate political discourse,’ and any persons or groups who say so are declaring war on democracy and aligning themselves with terrorists.”
Democratic Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia echoed the sentiment.
“The Republican Party just declared the January 6th attack on the Capitol – 140+ police officers wounded, multiple deaths, and criminal charges for sedition – ‘legitimate political discourse,'” Beyer tweeted. “The GOP officially supports violent criminal assaults on police, and on our democracy.”
Jennifer Mercieca, a historian of American political rhetoric at Texas A&M University, said she can say with “certainty that the January 6th insurrection was not legitimate, nor was it ‘political discourse,'” adding that the riot “was political violence.”
Read more at the link.
Also in the news yesterday, Mike Pence kinda sorta stood up to his hold boss, saying “Trump was wrong” about the vice president have a the power to overturn the election by refusing to certify electoral votes. Naturally Trump was enraged and hit back.
In a statement issued by his Save America PAC more than six hours later, Trump said, “Just saw Mike Pence’s statement on the fact that he had no right to do anything with respect to the Electoral Vote Count, other than being an automatic conveyor belt for the Old Crow Mitch McConnell to get Biden elected President as quickly as possible.”
“Well, the Vice President’s position is not an automatic conveyor if obvious signs of voter fraud or irregularities exist,” Trump added. “That’s why the Democrats and RINOs are working feverishly together to change the very law that Mike Pence and his unwitting advisors used on January 6 to say he had no choice. The reason they want it changed is because they now say they don’t want the Vice President to have the right to ensure an honest vote. In other words, I was right and everyone knows it. If there is fraud or large scale irregularities, it would have been appropriate to send those votes back to the legislatures to figure it out. The Dems and RINOs want to take that right away. A great opportunity lost, but not forever, in the meantime our Country is going to hell!”
Late Friday night the Justice Department released new videos from the January 6th Capitol riot where one insurrectionist pledged to drag former vice president Miek Pence through the streets for treason that led to him calling for Donald Trump’s former running mate to be decapitated.
CNN’s Amara Walker shared the videos — with a warning about the language — that showed the bearded rioter looking into his camera and raging at Pence for betraying supporters of the former president.
In the video the unidentified man can be heard asking if Pence held up the certification of Joe Biden as president before launching into a profanity-laden attack on the former vice president.
“I’m hearing that Pence just caved. Is that true?” he asked. “I’m telling you, if Pence caved we’re going to drag motherf*ckers through the streets. You f*cking politicians are going to get drug through the streets because we’re not going to have our f*cking sh*t stolen.”
“If we find out you politicians voted for it we’re going to drag your f*cking asses through the street,” he continued before turning back to Pence.
“Let me find out Pence — let me find out you treasoned (sic) the country. I’ll f*cking drag your ass too” he shouted. “Cut their head off! You do the right thing or we’re going to force you to do the right thing.”
I’ve pretty much had the television off all week. I could only handle Haterpalooza in small doses of video and print. The Republican Party has no claim to anything any more other than enabling white supremacists, nativists, and bigots. I am no longer patient with any one that is looking towards a third party vote. Donald Trump is not a sane person. He is not a mature adult. He is a clear and present danger to the existence of humanity, this country, and the world. The act of nominating Donald Trump is a declaration of war on humanity, the US Constitution, and civilization. There is no amount of blackmailing emotional, philosophical, or verbal gymnastics that you can do to justify a vote for anyone but Hillary Clinton at this point or you’ve just joined a war against humankind imho.
Donald Trump is not a candidate the American people would turn to in normal times. He’s too inexperienced, too eccentric, too volatile, too risky. Voting Trump is burning down the house to collect the insurance money — you don’t do it unless things are really, really bad.
Here is Trump’s problem: Things are not really, really bad. In fact, things are doing much better than when President Obama came into office.
Unemployment is 4.9 percent nationally — a number Trump knows is far from a crisis, because it’s lower than the unemployment rate Mike Pence is presiding over in Indiana, and Trump keeps bragging about his running mate’s economic record. The deficit has gone down in recent years, and the stock market has gone up. The end of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars mean fewer Americans are dying abroad. A plurality approve of the job Obama is doing.
So Trump needs to convince voters that things are bad, even if they’re not. He needs to make Americans afraid again. And tonight, he tried.
“Our convention occurs at a moment of crisis for our nation,” Trump said. “The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life. Any politician who does not grasp this danger is not fit to lead our country.”
As Jon Favreau, a former speechwriter for Obama, wrote on Twitter, this was Trump’s “Nightmare in America” speech. The address had one goal, and one goal only: to persuade Americans that their country is a dangerous, besieged hellscape, and only Donald Trump can fix it.
I have watched the Republican Party’s decline for some time. It hasn’t been pretty. But this is beyond ugly. Last night was a parade of white supremacists, theocrats, bigots, and the worst the country has had to offer. Any one that does not speak out against this cannot have the country’s best interests at heart. They are simply acting out of some kind of selfishness and privilege that’s beyond my grasp. So, now that I’ve quoted liberal Ezra Klein. Let me get you to the libertarian thoughts on the speech last night. ” Donald Trump’s RNC Speech Was a Terrifying Display of Nightmarish Authoritarianism. The GOP presidential nominee had only one solution to every problem: Give him more power.”
Donald Trump’s speech accepting the Republican nomination was easily the most overt display of authoritarian fear-mongering I can remember seeing in American politics. The entire speech was dark and dystopian, painting America as a dismal, dangerous place beset by violent outsiders. In response to the nation’s problems, Trump had only one solution: Donald Trump, the strongman who would take America back, by force if necessary.
Trump framed the speech by painting America as a nation under siege from urban crime, terrorism, and immigrants. He talked of rising homicide levels in some cities. He warned darkly of terrorist and immigrants, practically conflating them with urban violence, and told stories of Americans killed by those who had entered the country illegally. The simplest and more straightforward way to interpret Trump’s speech was as a warning that outsiders are coming to America to kill you and your family.
It was a relentlessly grim and gloomy picture of America, built on thinly disguised racial distrust and paranoia. It was a portrait that was also essentially false. Violent crime has been steadily falling for more than two decades. Immigrants are less prone to criminality than native-born Americans.
But portraying America in such a dark light let Trump cast himself as the nation’s dark hero, a kind of billionaire-businessman fixer, unbound by rules or expectations of decorum—President Batman, the only one with the guts and the will to fight for the people.
Trump did not invoke superpowers, of course, but he might as well have; he had no other ideas or solutions to offer.
In addition to terrorism and criminality, Trump stoked anxiety about jobs and the economy, lamenting bad trade deals and the loss of manufacturing jobs. As president, he said, he would take our bad trade deals—especially NAFTA—and turn them into good ones. He did not say one word about how, or even what a “good” trade would look like, only that he would fix the problem. Trump promised to bring outsourced jobs back to America, and, as he has in the past, threatened unspecified “consequences” to companies that move operations overseas.
Trump’s entire speech was packed with threats and power grabs, details be damned. It was a speech about how government should be made bigger and stronger and given more authority over every part of American life, and government, in most cases, simply meant Donald Trump himself. It was an argument for unlimited government under a single man, for rule by Trump’s whim. He sounded less like he was running for president and more like he was campaigning to be an American despot.
But if Trump is detached from the country, and uninterested in anything but himself, he’s also detached from his party. Trump is not really changing his party as much as dissolving it.
A normal party has an apparatus of professionals, who have been around for a while and who can get things done. But those people might as well not exist. This was the most shambolically mis-run convention in memory.
A normal party is united by a consistent belief system. For decades, the Republican Party has stood for a forward-looking American-led international order abroad and small-government democratic capitalism at home.
Trump is decimating that, too, along with the things Republicans stood for: NATO, entitlement reform, compassionate conservatism and the relatively open movement of ideas, people and trade.
The Republican Party nominated Donald Trump as its candidate for president of the United States – and I responded by ending my 44-year GOP membership.
Here’s why I bailed, quit, and jumped ship:
First, Trump’s boorish, selfish, puerile, and repulsive character, combined with his prideful ignorance, his off-the-cuff policy making, and his neo-fascistic tendencies make him the most divisive and scary of any serious presidential candidate in American history. He is precisely “the man the founders feared,” in Peter Wehner’s memorable phrase. I want to be no part of this.
Second, his flip-flopping on the issues (“everything is negotiable”) means that, as president, he has the mandate to do any damn thing he wants. This unprecedented and terrifying prospect could mean suing unfriendly reporters or bulldozing a recalcitrant Congress. It could also mean martial law. Count me out.
There are more reasons. Go check it out.
This is what happens when you sell your soul to angry bigots to pass tax cuts for the very wealthy. I should be dancing on a lot of graves–happily Roger Ailes is gone from Fox because the Barbie Army turned him in–but I can’t dance. I can’t celebrate. I can only stand here with my hair on fire and scream.
I’ve got so many places to send you for folks writing about how horrified they were by last night and the entire week. I’m going to let my friend Peter rep for them. Peter, I know this goes a step beyond “fair usage” but damn you Godwinned and you Godwinned appropriately.
I am obviously biased: I hate Donald Trump and am appalled that this sociopath has won a major party nomination. Following Trump closely has led me to modify my belief in Godwin’s Law. Here’s a rough paraphrase of it: mention the Nazis in an argument and you lose. I’ve always avoided Nazi and Fascist comparisons, believing them to be hyperbolic: who was worse than Hitler, after all?While I still don’t anticipate an American holocaust in the unlikely event that Trump is elected, I have to place Godwin’s Law on the back burner for the duration of the campaign. Donald Trump and his supporters represent the dark side of the American psyche and must be stopped.
On to the speech, I thought it was, in equal parts, horrible and horrifying. It was dark, brooding, and jumbled. The delivery was LOUD and wildly OTT. I felt bludgeoned after being screamed at for 76 minutes as well as depressed by listening to a speech that didn’t describe the America I live in.In between accusing Hillary Clinton and James Comey of crimes against the state, Trump told us to be scared, very scared. Even the ostensibly “uplifting” parts were stepped on by Trump’s red-faced, angry, and shouty delivery. I have my doubts that the American people want to be screamed at for four years. It will be bad enough to be shouted at for the next 3 1/2 months.
In substance, tone and delivery, it was a white nationalist speech full of attacks on minorities and immigrants. Brown people scare Donald Trump and he wants you to be afraid too. The speech went over well in the anti-Semitic community as well:
In addition to being delivered in a rather Hitlerian manner, Trump’s solution to every problem was himself. I am your voice, he said several times. Sounds like the Fuhrer principle to me. I wasn’t sure if he’s running for President or Dictator. If you saw it, you know it was that bad. The rest of the convention was funny, Trump’s speech was not.
No one will be surprised to hear that the speech was packed with lies and half-truths calculated to scare the living shit out of the audience. Politics USA has come up with 21 fact checked proven lies in the speech. I’m surprised it was that few. The audacity of mendacity should be the campaign’s slogan instead of Making America White Great Again.
Please notice the number of likes from last night on the David Duke Tweet and start being very afraid.
I’m going to make this short because I expect there will be another post up shortly announcing the VEEP choice of Clinton and it deserves a stand alone post.
Just rant away here because I know I feel a strong need to rant and cry. Here are some associated links.
Republicans announced Saturday that they had effectively canceled the first day of its convention for safety concerns associated with an impending hurricane.
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said in a statement that “the Republican National Convention will convene on Monday August 27th and immediately recess until Tuesday afternoon, August 28th.”
That move essentially postpones the activities of the first of four scheduled days of the convention. But Priebus said in a conference call with reporters that the details of the revised schedule were not yet settled, and could be announced as soon as Sunday.
“The Republican National Convention is going to take place. We know that we will officially nominate Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan,” he said.
Romney will now be formally nominated as the Republican Party’s presidential candidate on Tuesday instead of Monday, said Russ Schriefer, a senior strategist for the Romney campaign.
“Right now, we expect that the roll call will just take place on Tuesday,” he said.
Convention organizers had pushed ahead with the gathering as planned for much of the week, even as it seemed, for some time, that Isaac was on a direct trajectory toward Tampa.
So who got shut down? Looks like Senator Aqua Buddhas was on the list along with a list of other nutty nutty nuts. Ah, Marie Anntoinette got shut down. I was looking forward to watching the horse dance. Huckabee’s on the list too. The theme was we can do better. Right, you can do better at getting money out of the rest of us, I’m sure. It’s our job to join with Mother Nature to stop you.
Remarks by Speaker John Boehner
Remarks by Governor Rick Scott (FL)
Remarks by RNC Chairman Reince Priebus
Video
Remarks by Senator Rand Paul (KY)
Various Speakers
Remarks by Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (WA)
To Be Announced
Remarks by Artur Davis and video
Remarks by Senate Republican Candidate Ted Cruz (TX)
Musical Act
Remarks by Governor Nikki Haley (SC)
Remarks by Mike Huckabee
Remarks by Mrs. Luce’ Vela Fortuno
Remarks by Mrs. Ann Romney
Gee, they were even going to have a roll call and nomination. Guess that’s not gonna happen now. Actually, I was kind’ve hoping we’d get to really see the hatefest 24/7 for awhile. Let the public get in touch with the real Republican Agenda. Let’s just look at a few of those items sitting out there on the platform.
The draft official platform strongly supports a “a human life amendment” to the Constitution:
“Faithful to the ‘self-evident’ truths enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, we assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed,” the draft platform declares. “We support a human life amendment to the Constitution and endorse legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children.”
Let’s be very, very clear that such an amendment—which Mitt Romney has said unequivocally he would sign—would not only criminalize abortions of any kind for any reason, but also would outlaw many forms of contraception, in-vitro fertilization, and treatment of pregnant women with life-threatening conditions such as cancer. Moreover, it would also criminalize miscarriage.
This amendment is based on the self-same premise that was soundly rejected by voters in Colorado and Mississippi. Radical anti-choice advocates figure, it seems, if you can’t win it in the states, then beat them over the head with a constitutional amendment.
Romney, who in his quest to win the nomination of a party that is oozing with misogyny has all but promised to lock pregnant women in jail cells until they give birth, is now in a real pickle. Post-Akin, he states unequivocally that he would “oh, of course, no question” allow exceptions in otherwise radical abortion bans for rape and incest, through pre-Akin he was absolutely, positively clear he would not allow such exceptions. Ryan is just Akin without the political Tourettes Syndrome: He was an original co-sponsor of the bill to redefine rape, and to let Catholic hospitals deny women care. He also is a co-sponsor of the Sanctity of Human Life Act.
NO ABORTION IN CASES OF RAPE OR INCEST. The proposal for a “human life amendment” passed without a hitch — and without any exceptions for rape or incest. The committee didn’t stop there; they also adopted language that would ban drugs that end pregnancy after conception, which could potentially include Plan B, the “morning after pill.”
SALUTE TO MANDATORY ULTRASOUNDS. The GOP officially praises states’ “informed consent” laws that force women to undergo unnecessary procedures, require waiting periods and endure other measures meant to discourage them from getting an abortion. One such law receiving a “salute” was crafted by committee head McDonnell, who passed a notorious mandatory ultrasound requirement after he signed an unsuccessful bill to require an even more invasive transvaginal probe ultrasound during an abortion consultation.
NO LEGAL RECOGNITION OF SAME-SEX COUPLES. The committee embraced extreme anti-gay language, even rejecting a proposal to endorse civil unions for gay couples after vehement objections from Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council and Romney adviser Jim Bopp, who called it a “counterfeit marriage.” The rejection of civil unions, along with the refusal to include a line affirming the legal equality of same-sex couples prompted the organization GOProud to declare, “Those who have engaged in this public platform fight have provided distraction from important issues and damaged Mitt Romney’s campaign.”
REPLICATE ARIZONA-STYLE IMMIGRATION LAWS. Kris Kobach, who wrote the now mostly invalidated immigration laws in Arizona and Alabama, pushed for language calling for a border fence, a national E-Verify system to make it harder for undocumented workers to find employment, the end of in-state tuition for illegal immigrants and an end to sanctuary cities. The committee overwhelmingly approved the proposals, as well as a line chastising the Department of Justice to halt the lawsuits against draconian immigration laws in Arizona, Alabama, South Carolina and Utah: “State efforts to reduce illegal immigration must be encouraged, not attacked.”
AUDIT THE FED. The pet project of Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) to audit the Federal Reserve has now been embraced as an official Republican goal. For the first time, the platform calls for an annual audit of the Federal Reserve.
NO WOMEN IN COMBAT. The platform condemns “social experimentation” in the military, which covers everything from the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” to allowing officers to wear their uniforms in gay pride events to letting women serve on the front lines.
NO STATEHOOD, MORE GUNS FOR WASHINGTON DC. FRC’s Perkins, who recently blamed President Obama and the Southern Poverty Law Center for the shooting at FRC’s Washington headquarters, requested and received a section specifically urging the DC Council to expand gun rights. The same section also opposes DC statehood, which would allow the District to govern itself and put an end to Congressional attempts to impose abortion bans on DC.
NO NEW TAXES, EXCEPT FOR WAR. The platform calls for a Constitutional amendment requiring a super-majority to approve any tax increase, “with exceptions for only war and national emergencies.” It would also deliberately hobble future Congresses through a cap limiting all government spending to historical average percentage of GDP — “so that future Congresses cannot balance the budget by raising taxes.”
Yeah. It’s that bad. So, it’s just Hurricane Season and that’s what you get when you plan a big shin dig in the Gulf during hurricane Season. But, hurricane season is worse because of Global Warming so there has to be a little karma in there somewhere. However, somewhere down inside in me is the kid that liked to gather up lots of clean white sheets and make fluffy “clouds” on the front lawn. My girlfriend and I liked to play “goddesses” and zap those hapless humans as Athena and Aphrodite. It would be nice to think that up there on Mt. Olympus that they joined Demeter to avenge the natural order of things.
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Yesterday was a great day. President Obama took a clear stance on a very important issue, saying that same sex couples should have the same marriage rights and privileges as every other American. But this really is not about marriage or about LGBT rights. It’s about equal rights for every citizen of this country. The President’s action is a big step in the right direction.
The New York Times has the behind the scenes skinny on how Obama decided to take his stand yesterday.
Before President Obama left the White House on Tuesday morning to fly to an event in Albany, several aides intercepted him in the Oval Office. Within minutes it was decided: the president would endorse same-sex marriage on Wednesday, completing a wrenching personal transformation on the issue.
As described by several aides, that quick decision and his subsequent announcement in a hastily scheduled network television interview were thrust on the White House by 48 hours of frenzied will-he-or-won’t-he speculation after Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. all but forced the president’s hand by embracing the idea of same-sex unions in a Sunday talk show interview.
Obama had intended to state his position on the issue before this summer’s Democratic Convention, but Joe Biden’s statement of his support for same-sex marriage last weekend accelerated the decision-making process.
Initially Mr. Obama and his aides expected that the moment would be Monday, when the president was scheduled to be on “The View,” the ABC daytime talk show, which is popular with women….
Yet the pressure had become too great to wait until then, his aides told him; on Monday, the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, was pummeled with questions from skeptical reporters about Mr. Obama’s stance. After the Tuesday morning meeting, Dan Pfeiffer, the president’s communications director, contacted ABC and offered a wide-ranging interview with the president for the following day.
Meanwhile, Mitt Romney announced that he continues to oppose same-sex marriage and he also opposes civil unions that resemble marriage. Appearing on a local Fox station in Colorado, Romney
“Well, when these issues were raised in my state of Massachusetts, I indicated my view, which is I do not favor marriage between people of the same gender, and I do not favor civil unions if they are identical to marriage other than by name,” Romney told KDVR. “My view is the domestic partnership benefits, hospital visitation rights, and the like are appropriate but that the others are not.”
RNC Chairman Reince Priebus responded to Obama’s announcement by suggesting that same-sex marriage would be an issue in the presidential race.
“While President Obama has played politics on this issue, the Republican Party and our presumptive nominee Mitt Romney have been clear,” Priebus said. “We support maintaining marriage between one man and one woman and would oppose any attempts to change that.”
IMO, it would be huge mistake for Romney to focus on social issues in the campaign, his campaign knows it. Just look what happened when Rick Santorum did it. But Romney should be forced to clarify his stance on this issue. Buzzfeed offered five questions to help him do so. Check it out.
“That the president has chosen today, when LGBT Americans are mourning the passage of Amendment One, to finally speak up for marriage equality is offensive and callous,” said R. Clarke Cooper, Log Cabin Republicans Executive Director. “Log Cabin Republicans appreciate that President Obama has finally come in line with leaders like Vice President Dick Cheney on this issue, but LGBT Americans are right to be angry that this calculated announcement comes too late to be of any use to the people of North Carolina, or any of the other states that have addressed this issue on his watch. This administration has manipulated LGBT families for political gain as much as anybody, and after his campaign’s ridiculous contortions to deny support for marriage equality this week he does not deserve praise for an announcement that comes a day late and a dollar short.”
Here’s the official White House list of stuff the Obama administration has done for the LGBT community. It is not remotely comprehensive. Obama has done more for the LGBT community in three years than every single previous president combined. If that’s “manipulating” the LGBT community, what do the Log Cabin Dummies consider “full-throated support?” Should he divorce Michelle and marry Joe Biden?
As for the claim of “political gain;” what gain would that be? Will moderates suddenly sit up and say, “YES! The hell with the economy! I was only interested in gay rights!”? Will conservatives suddenly feel that their institutional bigotry is misplaced and they should embrace the LGBT community as fellow humans instead of condemning them to burn for eternity as “unnatural?” Will the GOP decide that perhaps gay-baiting is not the way to go and focus on the issues? Hell, gay Republicans can’t even muster any support for Obama. They’re outraged! They’re offended! Not at their own party whose official platform is virulently anti-gay but at that goddamned Obama for not supporting them sooner! Obama gets nothing from supporting gay marriage and only hands the right another cudgel to attack him with.
Congress took up legislation that could significantly impact women’s health — and no, it doesn’t limit contraception or force anything into their vaginas.
The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act aims to protect pregnant women in the workplace from common discrimination — not being allowed to carry a water bottle, for example — that threatens their health and stops them from being productive employees, or from working altogether.
Introduced by Reps. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), Jackie Speier (D-CA), Susan Davis (D-CA) and George Miller (D-CA), the bill would “ensure that pregnant women are not forced out of jobs unnecessarily or denied reasonable job modifications that would allow them to continue working,”
The Republicans will fight it, and let’s hope lots of pregnant women hear about a new front in the War on Women and punish them in the voting booth.
The U.S. Postal Service said on Wednesday that it is abandoning for now its plan to close thousands of post offices in rural locations and instead will shorten their hours of operation.
The change represents a victory for U.S. lawmakers and rural communities who created a backlash against the cash-strapped agency last summer when it began considering more than 3,600 post offices for closure this year.
Rather than shuttering offices starting next week, when a self-imposed moratorium on closings was set to end, the plan is to cut the operating hours of 13,000 locations with little traffic to between two and six hours a day.
It’s good news/bad news situation, with hours being cut at rural post offices; but it’s a step in the right direction.
And even more good news–can you believe it? The Justice Department announced yesterday that it plans to sue Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona for civil rights violations.
The U.S. Justice Department has been seeking an agreement requiring Arpaio’s office to train officers in how to make constitutional traffic stops, collect data on people arrested in traffic stops and reach out to Latinos to assure them that the department is there to also protect them.
Arpaio has denied the racial profiling allegations and has claimed that allowing a court monitor would mean that every policy decision would have to be cleared through an observer and would nullify his authority.
Justice Department officials told a lawyer for Arpaio on April 3 that the lawman’s refusal of a court-appointed monitor was a deal-breaker that would end settlement negotiations and result in a federal lawsuit.
I hate to ruin the upbeat mood, but I felt I had to include this article from the BBC: ‘Vomiting and screaming’ in destroyed waterboarding tapes. It’s an interview with Jose Rodriguez, head of the CIA Counterterrorism Ceneter, and the man who destroyed the torture tapes. Read it if you can stand it. I think every American needs to know what was done in our name.
What are you reading and blogging about today?
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
Robert Reich sums up what I feel about Biden’s four years. I was beginning my career as an economist when Ronald Reagan took over. I was working in a highly regulated banking industry about to be turned loose. Eventually, my first home had a fixed rate of 16.7%, which my employment turned into 12%. That’s just one of the nightmare stories I have to tell students.
If you notice the last two Republican administrations with the emphasis on the last one, there were very few real economists who advised the President. Trump only had one with the creds but was considered insane by his peers because he fitted his papers to a political take rather than data analysis and the usual scientific method.
So, while this shindig in Chicago gets going, watch the week for Trump’s further insane adventures for attention. Unfortunately, he usually succeeds at getting press attention even when it’s not newsworthy or basically a rant of a senile old man stuck in the 1980s. People need to know how bad it was 4 years ago with COVID-19 unassailed by policy and treated with denial. We are the strongest economy in the world with the strongest growth. Economists were prepared to see China become the number one economy shortly, but it’s not because of this administration’s policy. Inflation is back within normal parameters. That’s not to say there are not people who still aren’t seeing the benefits. But Kamala’s policy announcement last Friday was full of suggestions to get everyone back on track. The answer to folks left behind is not in the Project 2025 Playbook. (See BB’s post on Saturday for coverage of the Harris/Walz economic priorities in her
To borrow an old ad meme, where’s the beef? Well, it was sitting on the table at that presser, rotting in the sun. That’s quite a metaphor for what’s happening with the DonOld/JD show. JD’s rallies look like the Time Out Room for bad behavior. And no one can take 90 minutes of Trump’s senile ramblings on sharks, batteries, and how much better he looks than Harris.
“Anita Dunn says Joe Biden’s speech is about looking forward, not back. “This is not a time for legacy,” the longtime Biden aide said on CNN.” This analysis can be found at 
Greetings from the land of ice and snow! Massachusetts was covered in ice yesterday after the latest winter storm hit New England. Lots of people ventured out in their cars anyway. It didn’t go well. The Boston Globe: 
Raw Story 
Our Dear Miss Brooks calls it the “Death of the Republican Party”. 
the entire week. 
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