Newsom says he won't run in 2024
I have to admit, I'm rather surprised. I didn't expect him to challenge Biden, but for him to say he won't run regardless if Biden runs or not is surprising. I have to believe that is simply him trying to push as much political spotlight for 2024 off himself as possible, and if Biden did decide not to run again, he'd find a way back into the race.
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"Democrats now control all House seats along the Pacific Ocean for first time in memory"
Largely an interesting tidbit but ultimately isn't meaningful. More of a notable anomaly that ties well into the larger discussion of polarization. I thought it was notable that this has not happened since before Washington became a state.
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Peltola holds her Dem. seat in Alaska, first Alaskan native elected to Congress
And, also important, she kept Sarah Palin out.
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Schumer reportedly to name Sen. Patty Murray to President Pro Tempore, succeeding the retiring Leahy
Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) announced at the Senate Democratic lunch Wednesday that he will nominate Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) next month to serve next year as Senate president pro tempore, a position that is third in line to the presidency.
Notably, this would make her the first woman to hold the role.
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NPR is not having it
Archiving the post text:
BREAKING: Donald Trump, who tried to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election and inspired a deadly riot at the Capitol in a desperate attempt to keep himself in power, has filed to run for president again in 2024.
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Katie Hobbs defeats Kari Lake for AZ Govenor, nearly completing the crash and burning of the supposed "Red Wave"
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Jon Stewart talks with Safi Rauf about how America is failing Afghanistan
I listened to the podcast (mostly, not quite finished), but found the episode fantastic and eye opening. I was familiar with the issues for Afghanistan translators and others who worked with us while we ran the country, but some of the numbers discussed are eye opening. We've allowed 123 (I think that's the number they said) Afghani using the application process (which also costs almost $600, which is more than the annual salary for someone in Afghanistan.)
But, when compared to the process done for Cuba, Vietnam, and Iraq, it is laughable how bad it is. But then, comparing it to Ukraine, a current example, where they waived the fee and processed half a million applications in a few months - it's wildly openly racist all because of the fear of one of them being a terrorist.
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"Elizabeth Warren: Democrats Just Held the Senate. Here’s What We Do Next."
Elizabeth Warren is, perhaps, the US politican I most respect and look up to. I voted for her in the primary and I'm still sad she didn't win. But her words here are good as a look at what the Democratic party should do given the outcomes of this midterm.
President Biden presided over the best midterm elections for the party in the White House in 20 years — despite Washington insiders predicting that Democrats would be wiped out.
Donald Trump did his party no favors with his preening and support for downright awful candidates who lost. Nevertheless, this electoral success belongs to Mr. Biden, who ignored ivory-tower economists and out-of-touch pundits claiming that bold action to help families was bad politics. Instead, Mr. Biden delivered significant economic progress for working people.
Voters rewarded Democrats for protecting the lives and livelihoods of struggling families in a pandemic; modernizing infrastructure, not just talking about it; allowing Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices; capping insulin costs for older Americans; making tax-dodging corporations pay up on billions in profit; lowering carbon emissions and reducing utility bills; and canceling student debt for over 40 million Americans.
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For more than 14% of people who use insulin in the U.S., insulin costs consume at least 40% of their available income, a new study finds.
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Apparently Ammon Bundy, noted asshole, ran for governor of Idaho
He led the group in Oregon a few years ago when they took over the government building, and now he ran for governor of Idaho. Even more distressing is that he managed 100,000 votes. I am not altogether surprised, Idaho is filled with a lot of people who share his more problematic views.
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Obama to Heckler
"We get distracted," he said. "You got one person yelling and soon everybody's yelling, you get one tweet that's stupid and suddenly everyone's obsessed with the tweet. We can't fall for that."
I find this quote from Obama, after a heckler interrupted a speech of his an excellent framing for today. It is so so easy in today's world to be distracted individually and for society. Our entire entertainment machine is designed to provide endless distractions and society isn't coping with it very well.
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Heather Cox on the attack on Paul Pelosi
I haven't been blogging for a few weeks, but I found Heather's article excellent in summarizing and documenting the incident.
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"Teachers from Philippines help struggling U.S. schools amid teacher shortage"
I read this story over the weekend and meant to blog it. It is an eye opening look at the decimated ranks of American education and how it is in desperate need of a resurgence of national spotlight and support. Not only are these teachers coming to try and help the US, but they are also being forced into it once they discover it is not the promised paradise or opportunity they were lead to believe it to be.
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Jon Stewart talks with the Crooked Media Guys
I've listened to the Crooked Media podcast folks for a while, on and off, right now I mainly just listen to 'Offline' with Jon Favreau. Enjoyed this conversation a lot.
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@CallToActivism files to request the government charge DeSantis with kidnapping
Yeah, DeSantis is a huge asshole. But this sort of thing is exactly what he wants to build his martyrdom quotient before the election. Driving further the overreach of federal government, etc.
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"Idaho’s Far Right Suffers Election Loss to 18-Year-Old Climate Activist"
The student, Shiva Rajbhandari, was elected to the position by voters in Idaho’s capital last week, defeating an incumbent board member who had refused to reject an endorsement from a local extremist group that has harassed students and pushed to censor local libraries.
In an interview, Rajbhandari told The Intercept that although he had hoped people would vote for him rather than against his opponent — “My campaign was not against Steve Schmidt,” he said — he was nonetheless shocked that Schmidt did not immediately reject the far-right group’s endorsement. “I think that’s what the majority of voters took issue with,” Rajbhandari said.
Maybe the kids will be alright.
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Sen. Lindsey Graham introduces bill to ban abortion nationally
This is a fascinating bit of political and theater between the Republicans and Democrats. My guess is that this is a desperation play where they are hoping to scare Republicans who might vote Democratic back to the right. But I can't imagine that this is actually a winning strategy for them.
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Article explains why populism has a leg up on democracy when it comes to modern politics messaging
There's a lot of good stuff in this article. Good, in the sense of quality of the analysis and writing, not so much in the tone of the future. The author Rick Shenkman writes about a paper by UC Irvine professor Shawn Rosenberg. In addition to that, there is an interview that is actually what I was initially directed to and then backtracked through the source article and then the PDF paper itself (though I haven't read the latter yet.)
I pull excerpts from both the linked article as well as the conversation further down. I pulled a lot because I struggled to find what I could cut. It all felt important.
Democracy is hard work. And as society's "elites"—experts and public figures who help those around them navigate the heavy responsibilities that come with self-rule—have increasingly been sidelined, citizens have proved ill equipped cognitively and emotionally to run a well-functioning democracy. As a consequence, the center has collapsed and millions of frustrated and angst-filled voters have turned in desperation to right-wing populists.
His prediction? "In well-established democracies like the United States, democratic governance will continue its inexorable decline and will eventually fail."
[...]
He has concluded that the reason for right-wing populists' recent success is that "elites" are losing control of the institutions that have traditionally saved people from their most undemocratic impulses. When people are left to make political decisions on their own they drift toward the simple solutions right-wing populists worldwide offer: a deadly mix of xenophobia, racism and authoritarianism.
The elites, as Rosenberg defines them, are the people holding power at the top of the economic, political and intellectual pyramid who have "the motivation to support democratic culture and institutions and the power to do so effectively." In their roles as senators, journalists, professors, judges and government administrators, to name a few, the elites have traditionally held sway over public discourse and U.S. institutions—and have in that role helped the populace understand the importance democratic values. But today that is changing. Thanks to social media and new technologies, anyone with access to the Internet can publish a blog and garner attention for their cause—even if it's rooted in conspiracy and is based on a false claim, like the lie that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring from the basement of a Washington D.C. pizza parlor, which ended in a shooting.
While the elites formerly might have successfully squashed conspiracy theories and called out populists for their inconsistencies, today fewer and fewer citizens take the elites seriously. Now that people get their news from social media rather than from established newspapers or the old three TV news networks (ABC, CBS and NBC), fake news proliferates. It's surmised that 10 million people saw on Facebook the false claim that Pope Francis came out in favor of Trump's election in 2016. Living in a news bubble of their own making many undoubtedly believed it. (This was the most-shared news story on Facebook in the three months leading up to the 2016 election, researchers report.)
The irony is that more democracy—ushered in by social media and the Internet, where information flows more freely than ever before—is what has unmoored our politics, and is leading us towards authoritarianism. Rosenberg argues that the elites have traditionally prevented society from becoming a totally unfettered democracy; their "oligarchic 'democratic' authority" or "democratic control" has until now kept the authoritarian impulses of the populace in check.
Now from the conversation / interview on Salon. The bolded text is the initiating question, and his response follows.
How are you feeling about the state of the world and the global crisis of democracy? Several years ago, you predicted how bad things would get with the rise of global fascism and right-wing populism. You were largely ignored.
To me the world is somewhere between disconcerting and scary. Look at the world more broadly, Whatever my concerns may have been back in 2019, the world has continued to evolve in a direction that I was concerned it might. In fact, the world may have even become worse in terms of the prospects for democracy than I warned about in 2019.
I argued that liberal democratic politics is complicated, and populist alternatives offer a vision that is much simpler. All that populism demands is a simple story of cause and effect. All one needs to do is act: Authoritarian power is the solution.
This populist vision also has a very simple story about society and identity. In this story, social groups are natural. We think of them categorically. They don't have lots of overlap. In-groups and out-groups are distinct. Evaluative judgments are binary, a simple black-and-white story. There is good and bad. It's not a judgment in the sense of a subjective judgment. This way of thinking offers simple understandings of what is objectively true and what is not true, and is therefore deemed to be less valuable.
Populist ways of thinking about the world are ultimately just a lot simpler than the complexities of thinking about action as having multiple causes and consequences, thinking about groups being inherently diverse and overlapping, and thinking of judgment as a subjective, tentative thing. All of that is way too complicated for populists. Most people, not all, naturally incline toward that simpler vision if it is offered to them.
We tend to think about groups in negative terms, and when you're making evaluative judgments about things, they tend to be dualistic, black-and-white and unequivocal. That type of populist thinking was marginalized for a long time. What were once unacceptable ways of talking about politics are now part of the global discourse, and people are attracted to them. Many people do not really understand what liberal democracy is and why it is important, so they ultimately end up choosing populist alternatives.
Ultimately, that outcome is an ironic result of the greater openness of the public sphere and the democratic arena of ideas, where more people are empowered to make choices on their own. The gatekeepers have lost control.
[...]
How do we create a healthier democracy in the United States? What can the average American do on a day-to-day basis?
I am optimistic. I believe that there are solutions to the problem. We need to fix a broken educational system. The average American has trouble having productive discussions with people they disagree with and who are different from them. They're also not very good at reflecting on their own values and beliefs. The average American is also not very good in terms of critical thinking and understanding general principles.
We need to create an educational system that prepares adults to effectively negotiate the complexities of democratic life. We also need to broaden our understanding of what democracy is, beyond just voting. For the most part, you vote for candidates, and most people end up voting for their candidate either on the basis of a single issue, or they really have no idea at all and they're just voting for the party or their group identity.
America needs more deliberative democracy, and institutions and structures from the local level on up that will empower citizens to become more active. In the end, the American people need to be more involved in their own self-government.
Imagine you are the doctor of democracy and America is your patient. What is your assessment?
The patient is not terminal, but the patient is not stable either. They are moving toward critical condition.
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"Trump presented his Russia hoax theory to a court. It went poorly."
The opening to this article is so good:
One of the hallmarks of Donald Trump's tenure in American politics has been the extent to which he remained cocooned in his own world.
As president, that was often literal: He moved from the White House to his properties to tightly controlled events and to boisterous political rallies, rarely coming across critics or skeptics. It was also true of his presence in the public conversation. He had his Twitter universe and his Fox News conversations and he was content. Outsiders would peek in and report on what he was doing and saying and how it was received, but with a Star-Trek like result: There was no observable impact on the universe being watched.
It was a rhetorical terrarium, self-contained and self-sufficient. An ecosystem where nonsense thrived and spread, where false accusations competed Darwinistically for dominance. So his vague dismissals of the Russia investigation as a hoax in early 2017 had, by 2021, become complicated organisms, vines stretching and intertwining throughout the pro-Trump media universe.
And the finishing, while not as strong as the opening is quite good as well:
The judge made very clear that he understood Trump's suit for what it obviously is.
"At its core, the problem with Plaintiff's Amended Complaint is that Plaintiff is not attempting to seek redress for any legal harm ... instead, he is seeking to flaunt a two-hundred-page political manifesto outlining his grievances against those that have opposed him, and this Court is not the appropriate forum," he wrote.
The appropriate forum is cable news or Truth Social. You can't simply pluck a mushroom off a rotting log and transplant it onto a table and expect it to thrive. It needs the right environment, one in which credulity and fealty are abundant.
The real world is simply too inhospitable.
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