Greg Olear noticed Jared Kushner’s new role as a financier and his success at staying far, far away from his father-in-law’s trial in New York City. He also noticed that Jared had replaced Michael Cohen as Trump’s liaison with David Pecker and the National Enquirer. Naturally, he wonders why Jared is not being called to testify.
Archives for category: Elections
Indiana has plunged headlong into privatization of its-once-beloved public schools.
Fortunately, there is a knowledgeable candidate for Governor who has promised to stop the destruction of public education.
Jennifer McCormick is a career educator who began as a special education teacher, then became a language arts teacher, a principal and a district superintendent.
She was elected Indiana State Superintendent of Public Instruction in 2016; she ran as a Republican. She served out her four-year term and switched parties in 2021.
McCormick wrote on Twitter:
Indiana GOP’s school privatization efforts have diverted 1.6B of tax dollars away from public schools, and the majority of communities do not have families and/or private schools participating. As governor, I will champion for Indiana to pause funding school privatization.
At the NPE conference in D.C. in 2023, JenniferMcCormick and me.
Rick Wilson, a Never-Trump Republican and a founder of The Lincoln Project, warns about the danger of normalizing Trump:
I’m seeing a lot of traditional, DC “bothsides” reporting lately, arguing that this is at some level a “normal” election between a center-left Democratic party and a center-right Republican party.
This morning, Axios published a piece by Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei titled “Behind the Curtain: America’s reality distortion machine,” which caused a stir in political media circles.
It leads out with a question: “Here’s a wild thought experiment: What if we’ve been deceived into thinking we’re more divided, more dysfunctional, and more defeated than we actually are?” and proceeds to make some pretty good arguments about why we’re not a dystopian hellscape. I think they missed the big point, and this piece will stand out as a Washington Normalcy Bias exemplar for a long time.
My friend Molly Jong-Fast lit them up on Morning Joe,
She had precisely the right response: “But you understand that the conventional framing elevates the autocrat.”
No, not every American — in fact, not even a majority — is locked in the day to day of political struggle. Yes, there are silos. Yes, the algorithmic hypnosis of social media is real.
I cede all those points. America is a nation filled with hundreds of millions of people who aren’t partisan jihadis, left or right. There really is a desire for basic decency, decoupled from political rage, induced or not.
They’re not wrong to make these points, and the America they describe is one we should crave—not being involved in politics every moment of the day is a luxury only present in stable democracies.
But they ignore the existential issue underpinning this all.
We aren’t in a nation where the sensible center will survive if Donald Trump wins.
Only one side of the political argument wants their president to govern like a dictator. Only one side believes that the President is above the law — if his name is Donald Trump. Only one side of the political equation mounted an armed attack on the United States Capitol.
Only one side has welcomed the “no enemies to our right” philosophy, which means their party winks and nods at the alt-reich, the white nationalists, and the rest of the Daily Stormer crowd. Only one side is banning books, diving deeply into the seas of culture war cruelty and persecution.
Only one side backs America’s enemies abroad and promises to hand Europe over to Vladimir Putin on a plate. I could recite the Bill of Condemnation all day, but you understand the point.
The political movement that embraces the aforementioned horrors is MAGA, and its sole leader is Donald Trump.
Once again, the world is playing chess, and Donald Trump is eating the pieces and crapping on the board, and instead of horror, the reaction is a shrug.
This isn’t a regular election with typical outcomes.
Ordinary people living ordinary lives who think politics doesn’t matter and that the world will go on as it has can’t grapple with what happens in a post-American Presidency. It seems a lot of Washington reporters can’t either.
Normalcy bias is the best friend of authoritarians. If you think the algo-driven bubble on social media is robust, nothing tops normalcy bias. This cognitive bias can play into the hands of authoritarian regimes or leaders in a few ways:
It plays to the natural tendency for people to underestimate the possibility of a disaster, dictator, or disruptive event coming to the fore. It lets people assume that things will continue as normal because they’ve always been that way. (Berlin, 1936, anyone?)
It lulls people into complacency: they assume things will continue as they always have, and like frogs boiling in a slow pot, they may fail to recognize creeping authoritarianism and the erosion of democratic norms and civil liberties until it’s too late.
It makes people—even people reporting on it professionally—miss clear signals that a movement or regime is becoming more authoritarian, even when its leaders lay out their plans in broad daylight.
Once you say, “It can’t happen here,” there’s a high likelihood it’s already happening.
The normalcy bias makes people slow to react and resist authoritarian encroachments because they don’t perceive the seriousness of the threat until it’s too late.
Normalcy bias also rears its ugly head after the damage is done. Authoritarian actions are emergencies, you see. “The Caravan! Antifa! Transing the kids!” demand temporary measures lulling citizens into acceptance of the worst…and the temporary measures seem to last forever.
People convinced that the current system is immutable are less likely to make contingency plans or organize resistance against potential authoritarianism taking root. Trust me, the Never Trump folks screaming into the void for the last decade can tell you all about this one.
It’s tempting to hope that societal inertia in the center will overcome the energy and danger on the MAGA flank.
It hasn’t, and it won’t.
Jim Hightower is an old-fashioned Texas liberal. He tries to understand what’s happened to his state in his blog. The GOP is just plain mean and crazy.
He writes:
If you think the GOP’s Congress of Clowns represents the fringiest, freakiest, pack of politicos that MAGA-world can hurl at us – you haven’t been to Texas.
It’s widely known, of course, that Ted Cruz, Greg Abbott, and most other top Republican officials here are obsequious Trump acolytes. Thus, Texas is infamously racing against Florida to be declared the stupidest, meanest, most-repressive state government in America, constantly making demonic attacks on women’s freedom, immigrants, voting rights, public schools, poor people, and so on. But I’m confident Texas will win this race to the bottom for one big reason: GOP crazy runs extraordinarily deep here.
We have a county-level layer of ultra-MAGA cultists constantly pressing the state’s far-right officials to march all the way to the farthest edge of extremism – then leap into absurdity. Therefore, the party officially supports abolishment of labor unions, elimination of the minimum wage, privatization of social security, legalization of machine guns, and… well, you get the drift. Now, though, local mad-dog Trumpistas are pushing their party straight into the abyss of autocracy by declaring war on H-E-B.
What’s that? H-E-B is a Texas chain of supermarkets beloved in communities throughout the state. “Beloved,” because the stores fully embrace the rich diversity of all people in our state, has affordable prices, values employees, and supports community needs.
Nonetheless, county Republican zealots screech that H-E-B violates their party ideology by accepting food stamps, opposing privatization of schools, and (horrors!) sponsoring some LBGTQ pride events. So, they’re demanding official condemnation of the grocery chain for – GET THIS – “advocating for policies contrary to the Republican Party of Texas platform.”
Yes, violating the party platform is to be criminalized. It’s the reincarnation of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: Be MAGA… or else.
Thom Hartmann writes here about the nefarious role played by former Attorney General William Barr in his two different stints, first, when he worked as Attorney General for President George H.W. Bush, and later when he protected Trump from the damning findings of the Mueller Report about Russian interference in the election of 2016; Barr sat on it, summarized its conclusions inaccurately, and misled the public. Bill Barr was, Hartmann writes, “the master fixer” for “the old GOP.”
He writes:
Congressman Jim Jordan wanted revenge on behalf of Donald Trump against Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg for charging Trump with election interference in Manhattan.
He threatened Bragg with “oversight”: dragging him before his committee, threatening him with contempt of Congress; putting a rightwing target on Bragg’s back by publicizing him to draw sharpshooters from as far away as Wyoming or Idaho; and facing the possibility of going to jail if he didn’t answer Jordan’s questions right. Jordan, James Comer, and Bryan Steil — three chairmen of three different committees — wrote to Bragg:
“By July 2019 … federal prosecutors determined that no additional people would be charged alongside [Michael] Cohen. … [Y]our apparent decision to pursue criminal charges where federal authorities declined to do so requires oversight….”
They were furious that Bragg would prosecute Trump for a crime that the federal Department of Justice had already decided in 2019 and announced that they weren’t going to pursue.
But why didn’t Bill Barr’s Department of Justice proceed after they’d already put Michael Cohen in prison for a year for delivering the check to Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet at least until after the election, and then lying about it? Why didn’t they go after the guy who ordered the check written, the guy who’d had sex with Daniels, the guy whose run for the presidency was hanging in the balance?
Why didn’t the Department of Justice at least investigate (they have a policy against prosecuting a sitting president) the then-president’s role in the crime they put Cohen in prison for but was directed by, paid for, and also committed by Donald Trump?
Turns out, Geoffrey Berman — the lifelong Republican and U.S. Attorney appointed by Trump to run the prosecutor’s office at the Southern District of New York — wrote a book, Holding the Line, published in September, 2022, about his experiences during that era.
In it, he came right out and accused his boss Bill Barr of killing the federal investigation into Trump’s role of directing and covering up that conspiracy to influence the 2016 election. Had Barr not done that, Trump could have been prosecuted in January of 2021, right after he left office. And Jim Jordan couldn’t complain that Alvin Bragg was pushing a case the feds had decided wasn’t worth it.
As The Washington Post noted when the book came out:
“He [Berman] says Barr stifled campaign finance investigations emanating from the Cohen case and even floated seeking a reversal of Cohen’s conviction — just like Barr would later do with another Trump ally, Michael Flynn. (Barr also intervened in the case of another Trump ally, Roger Stone, to seek a lighter sentence than career prosecutors wanted.)”
Which is why Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg had to pick up the case, if the crime was to be exposed and prosecuted.
After all, this crime literally turned the 2016 election to Trump. Without it, polling shows and political scientists argue, Hillary Clinton would have been our president for at least four years and Trump would have retired into real estate obscurity.
But Bill Barr put an end to Berman’s investigation, according to Berman. The DOJ pretended to be investigating Trump for another few months, then quietly announced they weren’t going to continue the investigation. The news media responded with a shrug of the shoulders and America forgot that Trump had been at the center of Cohen’s crime.
In 2023, the New York Times picked up Bill Barr’s cover story and ran with it, ignoring Berman’s claims, even though he was the guy in charge of the Southern District of New York. The article essentially reported that Main Justice wouldn’t prosecute because Cohen wouldn’t testify to earlier crimes, Trump might’ve been ignorant of the law, and that the decision was made by prosecutors in New York and not by Barr.
Incomplete testimony and ignorance of the law have rarely stopped prosecutors in the past from a clear case like this one appears to be (Trump signed the check and Cohen had a recording of their conversation, after all), but the story stuck and the Times ran with it.
In contrast, Berman wrote:
“While Cohen had pleaded guilty, our office continued to pursue investigations related to other possible campaign finance violations [including by Trump]. When Barr took over in February 2019, he not only tried to kill the ongoing investigations but—incredibly—suggested that Cohen’s conviction on campaign finance charges be reversed. Barr summoned Rob Khuzami in late February to challenge the basis of Cohen’s plea as well as the reasoning behind pursuing similar campaign finance charges against other individuals [including Trump]. …
“The directive Barr gave Khuzami, which was amplified that same day by a follow-up call from O’Callaghan, was explicit: not a single investigative step could be taken, not a single document in our possession could be reviewed, until the issue was resolved. …
“About six weeks later, Khuzami returned to DC for another meeting about Cohen. He was accompanied by Audrey Strauss, Russ Capone, and Edward “Ted” Diskant, Capone’s co-chief. Barr was in the room, along with Steven Engel, the head of the Office of Legal Counsel, and others from Main Justice.”
Summarizing the story, Berman wondered out loud exactly why Bill Barr had sabotaged extending their investigation that could lead to an indictment of Trump when he left office:
“But Barr’s posture here raises obvious questions. Did he think dropping the campaign finance charges would bolster Trump’s defense against impeachment charges? Was he trying to ensure that no other Trump associates or employees would be charged with making hush-money payments and perhaps flip on the president? Was the goal to ensure that the president could not be charged after leaving office? Or was it part of an effort to undo the entire series of investigations and prosecutions over the past two years of those in the president’s orbit (Cohen, Roger Stone, and Michael Flynn)?”
In retrospect, the answer appears to be, “All of the above.”
And that wasn’t Barr’s only time subverting justice while heading the Justice Department. Berman says he also ordered John Kerry investigated for possible prosecution for violating the Logan Act (like Trump is doing now!) by engaging in foreign policy when not in office.
Barr even killed a federal investigation into Turkish bankers, after Turkish dictator Erdoğan complained to Trump.
Most people know that when the Mueller investigation was completed — documenting ten prosecutable cases of Donald Trump personally engaging in criminal obstruction of justice and witness tampering to prevent the Mueller Report investigators from getting to the bottom of his 2016 connections to Russia — Barr buried the report for weeks.
He lied about it to America and our news media for almost a full month, and then released a version so redacted it’s nearly meaningless. (Merrick Garland, Barr’s heir to the AG job, is still hiding large parts of the report from the American people, another reason President Biden should replace him.)
While shocking in its corruption, as I noted here last month, this was not Bill Barr‘s first time playing cover-up for a Republican president who’d committed crimes that could rise to the level of treason against America.
He’s the exemplar of the “old GOP” that helped Nixon cut a deal with South Vietnam to prolong the War so he could beat Humphrey in 1968; worked with Reagan in 1980 to sell weapons to Iran in exchange for holding the hostages to screw Jimmy Carter; and stole the 2000 election from Al Gore by purging 94,000 Black people from the voter rolls in Jeb Bush’s Florida.
Instead of today’s “new GOP,” exemplified by Nazi marches, alleged perverts like Matt Gaetz, and racist rhetoric against immigrants, Barr’s “old GOP” committed their crimes wearing $2000 tailored suits and manipulating the law to their advantage…and still are.
For example, back in 1992, the first time Bill Barr was U.S. Attorney General, iconic New York Times writer William Safire referred to him as “Coverup-General Barr” because of his role in burying evidence of then-President George H.W. Bush’s involvement in Reagan’s scheme to steal the 1980 election through what the media euphemistically called “Iron-Contra.”
On Christmas day of 1992, the New York Times featured a screaming all-caps headline across the top of its front page: Attorney General Bill Barr had covered up evidence of crimes by Reagan and Bush in the Iran-Contra “scandal.” (see the bottom of this article)
Earlier that week of Christmas, 1992, George H.W. Bush was on his way out of office. Bill Clinton had won the White House the month before, and in a few weeks would be sworn in as president.
But Bush Senior’s biggest concern wasn’t that he’d have to leave the White House to retire back to one of his million-dollar mansions in Connecticut, Maine, or Texas: instead, he was worried that he may face time in a federal prison after he left office, a concern nearly identical to what Richard Nixon faced when he decided to resign to avoid prosecution.
Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh was closing in fast on Bush and Reagan, and Bush’s private records, subpoenaed by the independent counsel’s office, were the key to it all.
Walsh had been appointed independent counsel in 1986 to investigate the Iran-Contra activities of the Reagan administration and determine if crimes had been committed.
Was the criminal Iran-Contra conspiracy limited, as Reagan and Bush insisted (and Reagan said on TV), to later years in the Reagan presidency, in response to an obscure hostage-taking in Lebanon?
Or had it started in the 1980 presidential campaign against Jimmy Carter with treasonous collusion with the Iranians, as the then-president of Iran asserted? Who knew what, and when? And what was George H.W. Bush’s role in it all?
In the years since then, the President of Iran in 1980, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, has gone on the record saying that the Reagan campaign reached out to Iran to hold the hostages in exchange for weapons.
“Ayatollah Khomeini and Ronald Reagan,” President Bani-Sadr told the Christian Science Monitor in 2013, “had organized a clandestine negotiation, later known as the ‘October Surprise,’ which prevented the attempts by myself and then-US President Jimmy Carter to free the hostages before the 1980 US presidential election took place. The fact that they were not released tipped the results of the election in favor of Reagan.”
That wouldn’t have been just an impeachable and imprisonable crime: it was every bit as much treason as when Richard Nixon blew up LBJ’s 1968 peace talks with North and South Vietnam to win that November’s election against Vice President Hubert Humphrey.
Please open the link to finish reading this fascinating article.
North Carolina has a serious problem. Its GOP has controlled the state since 2010, despite having a Democratic Governor for 8 years, who was made powerless by the legislature (General Assembly).
The GOP that swept the state in 2010 was Tea Party. But the top three GOP candidates in 2024—for governor, for attorney general, for state superintendent—are radical extremists. Not just MAGA, but QAnon batshit crazy.
Chris Seward of the Raleigh News & Observer wrote:
The woman who would take charge of K-12 education in this state has addressed her noxious trail of online posts — including calls to, you know, kill people — by not addressing them.
Ask the Republican nominee for state superintendent of public instruction, Michele Morrow, whether and, if so, why she would write such things and she seems irked that it should matter.
For instance, when confronted by a CNN reporter following a recent Wake County GOP event, Morrow deflected repeated questions about social media posts such as the one suggesting the execution of Barack Obama by firing squad on pay-per-view TV.
“Have a good night,” she said….
Meanwhile, Morrow is fueling her campaign with rhetoric that accused the state’s public schools of teaching “political and sexual and racially explicit stuff that’s poisoning our children’s minds and keeping them from getting a good education.”
Uh, maybe it’s only us, but calls to shoot people with whom you disagree seems a lot more harmful to our young children than teaching them that slavery was a bad thing.
Then again, CNN did ambush Morrow with a microphone and a camera.
Maybe in a friendlier environment, say, on the March 25 podcast of former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, she finally could explain herself and put this issue to rest once and for all?
She did, however, describe her Democratic opponent, former Guilford County Schools Superintendent Maurice “Mo” Green, as “the farthest left, extreme candidate they (Democrats) have ever thought about putting out for superintendent.”
She warned gravely: “Our state will be unrecognizable” if Green is elected.
Surely, the state GOP establishment has issues with Morrow’s over-the-edge pronouncements and provocations?
House Speaker Tim Moore, soon to take a seat in Congress in a gerrymandered district, addressed Morrow’s controversies with what probably will become a boilerplate response.
“I certainly wouldn’t have made those comments,” Moore said Wednesday.
Moore added that he plans to “support all the Republican nominees for office, and voters have to make up their own mind on what you think is a good choice for that office.”
Describing himself as a “good loyal, fellow Republican,” Moore said, “I’m going to vote for the Republican nominees for office.”
Translation: Yes, it’s a bad thing to endorse killing people. But if a Republican does it, Moore will support him or her for the good of the team.
That’s obviously the case as well with the state’s most powerful Republican, Senate leader Phil Berger. Berger earlier endorsed the GOP nominee for governor, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, who has posted or spoken out loud a veritable smorgasbord of offensive references to Jews, Muslims, Black people and the LGBTQ community.
“I just think he’s got a good head on his shoulders,” Berger said in November.
In fact, Robinson and Morrow have attracted so much attention that another GOP candidate vying for statewide office, Dan Bishop, has gone relatively unnoticed in his bid for attorney general.
Bishop, a sitting member of Congress, voted against certifying Joe Biden’s victories in Arizona and Pennsylvania. Bishop also opposed the debt-ceiling and budget deals former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy made with Democrats.
Before that, as a member of the General Assembly, Bishop sponsored HB 2, the “bathroom bill” that required transgender people to use public bathrooms matching the gender on their birth certificates. The bill, which also banned local anti-discrimination ordinances, cost the state’s economy an estimated $525 million in revenue from canceled business projects and sports and entertainments events before lawmakers partially repealed it.
Now he could become the head of the state’s Department of Justice.
What all of this means is that the norms have shifted in the Republican Party.
With the likes of Robinson, Bishop and Morrow on the Nov. 5 ballot, the GOP nominee for state superintendent may be right about at least one thing: Our state could be “unrecognizable” … not if they lose, but if they win.
We’ve got 99 problems in North Carolina, and Michele Morrow is only one of them.
Thom Hartmann reports on the growing numbers of nations that have rejected democracy and accepted authoritarian rule. The Republican Party, he notes, has pledged its loyalty to an authoritarian leader, accepted his lies about the 2020 elections, and is abandoning Ukraine to please him. Shockingly, very few elected Republicans have stood up to Trump; the few that did are no longer in office.
He writes:
Democracy is in trouble, and the Russian/Ukrainian conflict highlights how imperiled it is becoming in the 21st century. The real issue in Ukraine isn’t just land, any more than the real issue in the US is abortion: that’s all the activity on the surface.
What’s grinding away below the surface, however, is the erosion or outright destruction of democracy itself, whether by invasion from without or corruption from within.
Ukraine and Taiwan represent possible tipping points for democracy internationally, while Republicans passing laws that allow politicians to ignore the results of elections — and Republicans in the US House have refused to stand up for a fellow democracy for 16 months now — could be a tipping point here.
Around the world, and in America today, there are nations and politicians who do believe that democracy — governance via the will of the majority, carried out by elected representatives — is the best form of government for a republic.
At the same time, however, there are many who give lip service to democracy to accomplish their political ends but, in reality, believe that authoritarianism and oligarchy are better ways to rule a nation and keep peace around the world.
And that movement toward authoritarianism and away from democracy is growing.
Freedom House reported in 2021 that:
“[T]he share of countries designated Not Free has reached its highest level since the deterioration of democracy began in 2006, and countries with declines in political rights and civil liberties outnumbered those with gains by the largest margin recorded during the 15-year period. The report downgraded the freedom scores of 73 countries, representing 75 percent of the global population.”
One of those countries they identified as a place where democracy itself is under assault is the USA, where virtually the entire Republican Party has rejected supporting democracy at home and supporting democratic governments abroad.
While this may seem like it’s just a conflict between Russia and the US/Europe, what’s really at stake here is a much, much larger issue.
The real question at the core of the Ukraine conflict, as well as the geopolitical and domestic political positions taken by Fox “News” and many in the GOP, is simple and straightforward:
“What’s the best way for humans to govern themselves?”
The real issue in the Russia-Ukraine and the China-Taiwan (among others) conflicts is that core question of what form of government is best.
Both Ukraine and Taiwan are asserting that democracy is the best way for humans to govern themselves; Russia and China (and about half the other countries of the world) believe they know better — and that history is on their side.
Who’s right?
Is democracy viable and natural, the “best” form of human governance, or is it a weak attempt to accomplish do-gooder goals that simply aren’t realistic or, even worse, are violations of natural law and/or human nature?
Strongman authoritarian regimes, theocracies, and dynastic empires run by ruling families or landowning cliques have been the “norm” for most of the last 7000 years of “modern” human history.
Is that proof, as many on the hard right argue, that the “experiment” of democracy is unnatural and therefore doomed to failure? Should we let Trump overthrow democracy and establish authoritarian rule here in the US? Has the “American experiment” run its course?…
Virtually the entire Republican Party is now committed to authoritarianism instead of democracy. Not even one single Republican senator was willing to vote to guarantee free and fair elections when the We, the People legislation was before Congress, and the party is using Trump’s “stolen election” lie to undermine and ultimately end democracy at the state level.
Right now they are embracing Vladimir Putin instead of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of our Democratic ally. The Putin Caucus in the House is willing to overturn Mike Johnson‘s speakership in service of Putin.
The few former Republican holdouts, like Kinzinger and Cheney, are the exceptions that prove this rule: the GOP is no longer a political party that holds what most of the world has always thought to be “American values.”
They’ve joined the side of Russia and China in this debate, openly asserting that political power should flow from the top down; in our country’s case, they’ve embraced a ruling class of morbidly rich American oligarchs.
A “hot” war across greater Europe may be on the way if Ukraine falls, perhaps followed by China seizing Taiwan once the precedent of “reclaiming former territories” has been set.
This debate about how humans should govern themselves is the real battle of our time, both metaphorically and literally, both internationally and right here at home.
It’s being fought across social media, battled in the billions spent on elections, and even in state and local governments across the US as authoritarian politicians work to keep minorities, young people, women, and LGBTQ+ people “in their place” and away from the voting booth.
No matter how the crisis in Ukraine works out, the underlying dispute will remain: should humans govern themselves democratically from the ground up, or with oligarchy from the top down?
The future of democracy is hanging in the balance, not just in Ukraine and Taiwan but here in the US, as well.
Please open the link to read this article in full.
Please watch this episode of “The Daily Show,” which aired on April 15.
Jon Stewart is in rare form!
Trump’s description of the Battle of Gettysburg is a classic. Don’t miss it.
Jonathan V. Last writes for The Bulwark, an excellent Never Trumper site. He noticed a curious phenomenon. Whenever there’s good economic news, the mainstream media worries that good economics news is bad news for Biden? What?
He writes:
We’ve reached the ne plus ultra of Here Is Some Good News and Also Why It’s Bad for Biden headline writing. I present to you an April 13 story in the Washington Post by Abha Bhattarai and Tyler Pager. (Don’t click the link yet.)
The piece is about the current economic indicators we’re seeing in the March reports: Job growth, wage growth, consumer spending—all headed in the right direction. The economy is, the piece declares, “booming.”
Now, are you ready for the two headlines the Post gave the piece?
Before I make your head explode, this is the part where I say that you should join Bulwark+ because we don’t do happy talk, but we also don’t pull the type of nonsense where we say “Puppies were spotted at the White House, here’s why that’s bad for Biden.”
If we want a better media, we have to build it. That’s what we’re doing here and we’d love it if you joined us.
Okay, so back to the Post.
Here’s Headline #1:
And here’s Headline #2:
Here is a real sentence written by a real person at the Washington Post: “The economy’s unfettered strength is becoming more of a political liability for the White House.”
Are you forking kidding me?
We are deep into heads-I-win, tails-you-lose territory. Would it also be a political liability for the White House if, I dunno, we were experiencing deflation and the economy was shrinking? If unemployment was rising? If wage growth was stagnant?
Pray tell, describe the economic conditions which augur political benefits for the Joseph Robinette Biden?
My two complaints:
(1) The piece is wrong on the merits: We have seen a small—but measurable—increase in Biden’s poll numbers over the last month. He is not being harmed by the economy. Or at least, his political prospects are improving, so if the economy is causing him harm, that debit is being overbalanced by something else that’s working in his favor.
(2) The Post isn’t providing analysis, it’s manufacturing a rationalization. As I’ve written before, if you came down from Mars and looked at all of the economic data and had to guess who was winning the election right now, you’d think Biden was on track for a landslide. The fact that he isn’t indicates that something interesting is going on. Instead of investigating that interesting thing, the Post is trying to pretend that everything is normal. Which is what causes them to say, Uhhh, Biden’s not doing so hot. And the economy is great. So . . . here’s why having a great economy is bad for Biden!
1. Oh, who am I kidding: The videotape wouldn’t hurt Trump at all. Sigh.
Republican leaders, including Trump and gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, were appalled when Arizona’s Supreme Court overturned the state’s 15-week abortion and upheld an 1864 abortion ban.
Democrats wanted to introduce a bill to repeal the 1864 law. But today Republicans refused to consider their motion.
CNN reported:
The Republican-controlled Arizona House of Representatives once again failed to advance a repeal of the state’s 160-year-old abortion banWednesday, days after the state Supreme Court roiled state politics by reviving the law.
The vote is a blow to reproductive rights as well as GOP candidates in competitive races, who have been scrambling to distance themselves from the court’s decision. Republicans facing competitive races in the state, including former President Donald Trump and US Senate candidate Kari Lake, called on the GOP-controlled legislature to work with Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs to take a more moderate path.
On Wednesday, following two attempts to discuss a bill that would repeal Arizona’s 1864 ban on abortions, lawmakers voted not to discuss the measure on the House floor.
The representatives’ votes were evenly split, with the chair making the tie-breaking decision. The bill itself was not brought up for a vote.
“The last thing we should be doing today is rushing a bill through the legislative process to repeal a law that has been enacted and affirmed by the legislature several times,” House Speaker Ben Toma said during debate.
If the 1864 law were repealed, Arizona would revert back to a 15-week abortion restriction signed into law in 2022 by then-Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican. The state court delayed enforcement of the ban for at least 14 days to allow plaintiffs to challenge it, meaning abortions are still allowed in the state.
The ban prohibits the procedure except to save the life of the pregnant person and threatens providers with prison sentences between two and five years.
If the 1864 law goes into effect, Arizona would join 14 states that have passed near total abortion bans, some with no exceptions for victims of rape or incest…
A March Wall Street Journal poll, conducted before the state Supreme Court ruling, found that 59% of registered voters in Arizona believe abortion should be legal in all cases or most cases with some restrictions. Another 27% said they believe abortion should be illegal with exceptions for rape, incest or when the pregnant person’s life is endangered. Nine percent said the procedure should be illegal in all cases.
