Monday, June 30, 2025

LARA TRUMP WOULD HAVE BEEN THE NORTH CAROLINA SENATE CANDIDATE NO MATTER WHAT

Many Democrats will see North Carolina senator Thom Tillis as a hero:
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said Sunday that the Senate version of President Trump’s massive spending bill “will betray the very promise” the president made when he pledged not to interfere with people’s Medicaid benefits.

Tillis — who voted against the bill in a key procedural vote Saturday night and announced Sunday he would not run for reelection — delivered a scathing rebuke of the president’s agenda-setting bill in a Senate floor speech....

“What do I tell 663,000 people in two years or three years, when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off of Medicaid because the funding’s not there anymore, guys? I think the people in the White House… advising the president are not telling him that the effect of this bill is to break a promise,” Tillis said in his floor speech.
But don't be too hasty to put Tillis on a pedestal.
Tillis ... said he would be inclined to support the House version of the Medicaid proposal....

“I love the work requirement. I love the other reforms in this bill. They are necessary, and I appreciate the leadership of the House for putting it in there,” he continued.

“In fact, I like the work of the House so much that I wouldn’t be having to do this speech if we simply started with the House mark....”
So it's good that he broke with the president and Senate leaders, but he's still a Republican. He still has Republican values.

I'm seeing claims that this improves Democrats' chances of taking Tillis's Senate seat in 2026, but I don't believe he would have been the GOP nominee if he'd run again. I know who's certain to be the nominee now if, as appears likely, she runs:
There might soon be another elected Trump in Washington.

President Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, is “seriously considering” a Senate run in her native North Carolina, a source told NOTUS. Another source close to the Trump family told NBC News that there is a “high” chance she will run.
The NBC reporter says:


If Tillis had stayed in the race, Lara Trump probably would have trounced him in a primary, according to one poll conducted in November:
A new poll by Victory Insights reveals shifting dynamics for the 2026 U.S. Senate race in North Carolina....

The poll shows Trump securing 65% of support, outpacing Tillis, who garners just 11%. Approximately 24% of respondents remain undecided. Victory Insights suggests that Trump’s appeal among grassroots conservatives gives her a strong advantage, particularly given dissatisfaction with Tillis among some pro-Trump Republicans.

“A substantial portion of the Republican base believes Tillis to be insufficiently conservative on several issues,” said Dr. Andy Jackson, director of the Civitas Center for Public Integrity at the John Locke Foundation. “Delegates to the 2023 North Carolina Republican Convention voted to censure Tillis over his supposed deviances from the party platform.”
We're told that those "supposed deviances" include " support for gay marriage and immigration reform."

So Lara Trump would have shellacked Tillis in a primary. What about a general-election matchup against the Democrats' strongest potential candidate, former governor Roy Cooper? It's a tossup -- and a Tillis-Cooper race would also have been a tossup:
In the poll, a matchup between Roy Cooper and Thom Tillis shows Cooper leading Tillis by a narrow margin of 1.1%, with 45.1% of the vote compared to Tillis’s 44.1%. If Cooper were to face Lara Trump, his edge is slightly larger at 1.2%, with 45.5% compared to Trump’s 44.3%.
This will be a referendum on Donald Trump, who's significantly underwater in some North Carolina polling (41%-56% according to a Meredith College survey conducted in April), but only slightly underwater in other polls (42%-45% according to Elon University in March, 45.5%-50.8% according to Carolina Journal in May). As horrible as the actions of the Trump administration are, I don't expect these numbers to change much in the next year and four months. So this race is a tossup. Republicans will probably nominate the candidate they would have nominated anyway, and voters will mostly stay in their lanes.
at

Sunday, June 29, 2025

A GENUINE BIGOT WHO'LL NEVER BE MENTIONED ON A SUNDAY D.C. TALK SHOW

Democratic establishmentarians continue to attack Zohran Mamdani.


But I don't see the national media asking anyone about this guy:
Religious leaders and advocates were calling for the removal of Tarrant County GOP chair Bo French in response to a social media post they described as divisive and inflammatory.

French posted a poll Wednesday for his 28,000 followers on X to vote on whether they believed "Jews" or "Muslims" were the "bigger threat to America."

... The Republican Party of Texas did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
French has since removed the poll.

Tarrant County isn't some podunk backwater. It's the fourteenth-largest county in America by population, with a population of more than 2.2 million. It includes Fort Worth, the tenth-largest city in America.

French's tweet has been denounced by the Republican mayor of Fort Worth, Mattie Parker, as well as by Craig Goldman, a Republican who represents part of Fort Worth in Congress. He's also been condemned by Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick, but not, as fas as I can tell, by Governor Greg Abbott, by attorney general and likely future senator Ken Paxton, or by the state's current senators, Ted Cruz and John Cornyn.

This is hardly the first time French has said something offensive, as The Texas Tribune noted last October:
“This is the gayest ad in history,” French, 55, wrote in an Oct. 11 response to a Democratic advertisement on X, formerly known as Twitter. “Guarantee every one of these ‘dudes’ is a homo. There is literally nothing manly about any of them.”

“Retard strength,” he wrote Tuesday under a video from the Major League Baseball World Series. "Never go full retard," he said in response to former Republican U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney on Oct. 4.

In another post, French polled his 14,000 followers about the upcoming election between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. “If you believe Harris’ policies are better for Americans than Trumps’ policies, you are:” he asked before listing four choices. “Ignorant,” “A liar,” “Retarded,” or “Gay.”
(Apparently, the earlier controversies helped French double his follower count, from 14,000 to 28,000. It's more than 30,000 now.)
... French has continued to pull the Tarrant County GOP further right. In September, the party hosted Jack Posobiec, a prominent far-right activist who has praised Chilean autocrat Augusto Pinochet and Spanish fascist dictator Francisco Franco, both of whom oversaw the murder, torture or imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of their political opponents.

And in July, French joined other Republican leaders onstage at a conference in Fort Worth that urged attendees to resist a Democratic campaign to “rid the earth of the white race” and embrace Christian nationalism. The event was held by True Texas Project ... whose leaders have sympathized with the racist motives of the gunman who murdered 23 Hispanic people at an El Paso WalMart in 2019. The conference included several speakers who have frequently collaborated with white nationalists or eugenicists, prompting far-right Republicans such as former U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert and former State Sen. Don Huffines to condemn or pull out of the event.
If you're hanging out with people who are too far right for Louie Gohmert, you really are at the extreme edge.

On X this week, French called Supreme Court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson a "subtard" and described her dissent in Trump v. CASA as "Example number 47 million why DEI is dangerous." He responded to Zohran Mamdani's primary victory by saying, "Deport the islamitard." And he calls for the deportation of 100 million people, including "60 million illegals," which is probably five times the actual number of undocumented people in America.


He also wants to stop all legal migration and resume it under a regime in which immigrants can be deported unless they "swear to uphold American and Christian values."


And if you're merely a native-born Democrat? You're a murderous totalitarian.


But the national press sees this as completely unremarkable. In our dominant media narrative, Republicans are the normal, mainstream, moderate party, while all Democrats are expected to struggle every day to convince us that they aren't extremists.
at

Saturday, June 28, 2025

THE SUPREME COURT'S REPUBLICANS KNOW OUR SIDE WILL NEVER USE THE POWER THEY'VE POTENTIALLY GIVEN US

As you know, yesterday the Supreme Court ruled that lower-court judges can't protect even fundamental constitutional rights using nationwide injunctions. In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote:


The six Republicans on the Court aren't worried. Why should they be? They know what Democrats are like. They know what judges appointed by Democrats are like.

It's not clear whether the Court's Republicans intend to spend the next few years working with the Trump administration to create a Hungary-like "competitive authoritarian" system in which the country has the appearance of free elections, but the ruling party rigs the game so the opposition can't really win. That's probably the plan. But even if it isn't -- even if Democrats will compete in future elections on a level playing field, and could be running the country in a few years -- the Court's Republicans know they won't try to push the boundaries of the acceptable the way Trump has.

Taking guns away from the law-abiding? That only happens in the fever dreams of Republicans. Bill Clinton was president for eight years and it didn't happen. Barack Obama was president for eight years and it didn't happen. Joe Biden was president for four years and it didn't happen. It hasn't happened in the bluest of states. Even when there have been restrictions on who can own guns or at what age a particular kind of gun can be purchased, no Democratic administration has even suggested going house to house and rounding up firearms that had previously been obtained legally. "Red flag" laws exist, but no one is being deprived of weapons without a good reason, subject to due process. And even an assault weapons ban wouldn't prevent a would-be purchaser of assault weapons from buying any other kind of gun -- or a dozen guns of other kinds -- instead.

And there simply isn't a strain of liberal legal thought that tosses the Constitution, law, and precedent out the window and says that whatever liberals want is the Framers' intention. No one who'd uphold a statewide gun confiscation program would ever be appointed to the federal bench, even if Democrats held the White House and the Senate.

And I know of no Democrats who want to deprive any religious denomination of the right to worship. Yes, there were restrictions on in-person services in some Democratic jurisdictions at the height of the COVID pandemic, but they weren't efforts to outlaw any particular faith. Again, this is a scenario that plays out only in Fox-addled Republicans' imaginings. (Although it's quite easy to imagine Republicans banning worship by Muslims.)

The Supreme Court's Republicans aren't worried that the shoe might be on the other foot someday because they know the shoe will never be on the other foot. This is why they're willing to give Donald Trump nearly unlimited power: they know that any Republican would use the power in ways they like and no Democrat would ever use it in ways they dislike. They're giving powerful weapons to Trump and future party-mates because they know the enemy -- Democrats -- will never use those weapons.
at

Friday, June 27, 2025

AN UNABASHED BIGOT COULD BE ON THE VERGE OF VICTORY, BUT HIS NAME ISN'T MAMDANI

A new poll shows a bigot leading in the polls in a key race. The bigot's name? Paul LePage.
A prospective matchup between Maine Congressman Jared Golden and former Maine Governor Paul LePage in Maine's 2nd Congressional District is statistically tied at this early date. However, LePage is more popular than Golden in the 2nd district....

With the election more than a year away, half (50%) of Maine 2nd Congressional District residents say they would vote for LePage if the election were held today, 47% would vote for Golden, 2% would vote for another candidate, and 2% are undecided.
The poll is from the University of New Hampshire.

Many people, including a disturbing number of Democrats, are trying to generate a national moral panic about the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani is accused of anti-Semitism largely because he's sharply critical of Israel's treatment of Palestinians. Mamdani has expressed sympathy for New Yorkers who fear anti-Semitic attacks and promises a significant increase in funding for programs to combat hate crimes. By contrast, LePage -- who could help Republicans maintain control of the House of Representatives if he flips a Democratic seat in 2026 -- is unquestionably a racist.
LePage generated national headlines by stating at a January 6, 2016, town hall meeting in Bridgton regarding drug dealers:
(Drug dealers) are guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty; these types of guys, they come from Connecticut and New York, they come up here, they sell their heroin, they go back home. Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young, white girl before they leave, which is a real sad thing because then we have another issue we have to deal with down the road.
... On August 24, LePage was asked about these comments; he denied being a racist but said that he had been compiling a binder of drug arrestees since January and that "90-plus per cent of those pictures in my book, and it's a three-ringed binder, are black and Hispanic people." When asked to provide the binder, LePage replied, "Let me tell you something: black people come up the highway and they kill Mainers. You ought to look into that. You make me so sick." The Portland Press Herald subsequently filed a Freedom of Information Act request for LePage's binder.

... LePage produced a binder of drug arrestees and went through some of the mugshots with the press. While admitting that the binder contained photos of both blacks and whites, LePage produced a page with a photo and press clipping of a young white woman who had been arrested, LePage called her a "very lovely young Mainer, maybe 20 years old." He then held up another page with a picture of a black man on it and said, "That's the other culprit." Reporting on the incident, Portland Press Herald quoted figures showing that according to the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Service, in 2014 of the 1,211 people in Maine arrested on charges of drug sales or manufacturing only 14.1 percent were black, and almost all the rest were white.
Also, LePage
repeated other controversial comments he'd previously made on the topic. "You’ve been in uniform? You shoot at the enemy," he said at a statehouse press conference.... "You try to identify the enemy and the enemy right now, the overwhelming majority of people coming in, are people of color or people of Hispanic origin.”
And there was this in 2019, after LePage left office:
With Colorado on the verge of enacting the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact to nullify the Electoral College, the next state to sign on could be Maine, where a resolution is scheduled to be introduced in committee in the state House this week.

But former Republican Gov. Paul LePage ... is fiercely opposed to eliminating the Electoral College for an unlikely reason: he believes it would silence white people!

“What would happen – if they do what they say they’re going to do – is white people will not have anything to say,” said LePage in an interview with WVOM. “It’s only going to be the minorities that would elect. It would be California, Texas, Florida ... We’re gonna be forgotten people.”
Democratic moderates such as Senator Kirsten Gillebrand and Congresswoman Laura Gillen are denouncing Mamdani right now, but the allegedly moderate Maine Republican Susan Collins accepted LePage's endorsement when she was in a tough Senate race in 2020 and needed to shore up her right flank, and then endorsed LePage in his unsuccessful run for a third gubernatorial term in 2022. They'll probably endorse each other again as 2026 approaches.

Mainstream Democrats love to say, I'm not like these horrible left-wing extremists in my party, which is out of step with decent Americans except for candidates like me. Republicans, by contrast, say as little as possible when their party-mates become controversial. You'll never read a story about a Republican whose big move in pursuit of the 2028 presidential nomination is a denunciation of Marjorie Taylor Greene or Lauren Boebert. (A couple of Republicans tried this with Donald Trump in 2024 and were quickly sent packing.) No one in the media ever argues that the extremism of candidates like Kari Lake or Mark Robinson could doom the entire GOP. No one ever expects all Republicans to answer for their excesses, which are genuinely abhorrent.

Golden is a typical Democrat-hating Democrat -- he has defended Trump's wildly unpopular tariffs, attacked fellow Democratic members of Congress who've been detained or arrested while challenging Trump's immigration policies, and blamed the progressive group Indivisible for his own decision to stop holding town halls.

And, funny thing, Golden's approval rating among Democrats in his district is only 31%, according to that University of New Hampshire poll. LePage's approval rating among Republicans is 81%. Overall, LePage's approval rating is 43% in the district. Golden's is 21%. Gosh, maybe My party sucks -- vote for me isn't a winning message.
at

Thursday, June 26, 2025

IN NEW YORK, I'M ENJOYING THIS BILLIONAIRE FREAKOUT

Rupert Murdoch's New York Post reported yesterday that hedge-fund billionaire Bill Ackman had settled on a strategy for dealing with the (to him) intolerable victory of Zohran Mamdani in the New York Democratic mayoral primary:
Bill Ackman is preparing to back Eric Adams’ bid for reelection as New York City mayor — and is hoping that rival candidates will drop out to bolster the current mayor’s chances against Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani, The Post has learned.

... Ackman is hoping that [Andrew] Cuomo and Republican mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa will bow out of the November election to allow Adams a clearer run against the 33-year-old hard-left firebrand Mamdani, who is backed by AOC and Sen. Bernie Sanders.
The Post also reported that Cuomo was ready to step aside:
Andrew Cuomo will drop out of the mayor’s race after his humiliating defeat against socialist Zohran Mamdani, sources told The Post — as the ex-governor’s donors and backers desert him and weigh whether to boost Eric Adams.
But did the Post's souces actually talk to Ackman? Apparently not:


It appears that Murdoch was trying to rally the Masters of the Universe class around Adams and was attempting to drag Ackman into the pro-Adams camp kicking and screaming. (As I noted in the update yesterday, Adams appeared on Fox & Friends yesterday morning, and there were kind words about him in a Post editorial. Further evidence of Murdoch's commitment to Adams can be seen in a Kirsten Fleming column published in the Post last night under the headline "Mayor Eric Adams Is Ready to Apologize for Past Hires as He Vows to Rebuild Trust with New Yorkers.")

So what is Ackman's plan? He explained it after midnight last night in a tweet that was nearly 1,500 words long (switch to decaf, Bill!). I'll just give you the summary:


The fat-cat class discussed a different plan, but apparently it won't work, according to The New York Times.
At 2:30 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon, the Partnership for New York City, a big business group, held a meeting for a subset of its members to discuss the new political landscape.

In separate discussions, some business leaders even consulted election lawyers to see if there was a way to replace Andrew Cuomo on the ballot, should he not run in the general election as an independent, three people familiar with the conversations said....

But Jerry H. Goldfeder, a state election law expert, said that was unlikely to be a legal possibility.
Ackman alludes to that in his tweet, which is quoted below.


Well, it's not as bad as this idea:
On Wednesday ... the New York Young Republican Club, or NYYRC, took to X, begging Trump immigration advisers Stephen Miller and Tom Homan to revoke Mamdani’s U.S. citizenship and deport him.

“The radical Zohran Mamdani cannot be allowed to destroy our beloved city of New York,” the NYYRC’s post states. “The Communist Control Act lets President Trump revoke @ZohranKMamdani’s citizenship and promptly deport him. The time for action is now—@StephenM and @RealTomHoman, New York is counting on you.”

In the replies, the X account for the Republicans for National Renewal tweeted, “We fully support this initiative. Communist radical Zohran Mamdani should be remigrated as soon as possible,” and the John Birch Society approvingly posted a “100” emoji.

The message was reposted by the accounts of numerous conservative figures, including Gavin Wax, who was formerly the NYYRC president as well as the chief of staff for recently departed Federal Communications Commissioner Nathan Simington, who has recommended Wax as his successor.
I wouldn't completely rule out the possibility that the Trump administration will try to do this using the Communist Control Act, which is real. (It was signed into law by President Eisenhower in 1954.) But it's more likely that Ackman, Murdoch, and the rest of the billionaire class will persuade Cuomo not to run on the independent ballot line he's secured, and possibly persuade Sliwa to drop out and endorse Adams.

Meanwhile, the attacks on Mamdani will only escalate. The Post published this attack a few days before the primary and it didn't land, but I suspect it will go national now:
Socialist NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani once voiced his “love” for the five leaders of a notorious nonprofit convicted of funneling more than $12 million to the terror group Hamas.

The former C-list rapper-turned-far-left-pol praised the heads of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development – known as the “Holy Land Five”– in a shocking 2017 rap track uncovered by the antisemitism-fighting group Canary Mission....

“My love to the Holy Land Five. You better look ’em up,” Mamdani – who performed under the stage name Mr. Cardamom – says in a song called “Salaam” which the Queens assemblyman has said is about growing up Muslim in New York.
Canary Mission, which specializes in doxxing pro-Gaza activists, posted this:


There are, to put it mildly, differences of opinion about the Holy Land Five. Human Rights Watch says:
The Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development was shut down by the Bush administration and designated as a terrorist organization in the wake of 9/11, even though it donated money to Palestinian charities that the U.S. government itself supported. Its leaders are serving sentences of up to 65 years in federal prison.

The defendants in the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) case were never accused of directly funding terrorist organizations or terrorist attacks, nor were the Palestinian charities they funded accused of doing so. Nonetheless, they were prosecuted under US “material support” legislation on the notion that the social programs they financed help win the “hearts and minds” of Palestinian people for Hamas.
Expect a lot more of this between now and November. I wish I could tell you for certain that it won't work.

Meanwhile, if you're puzzling over what appears to be Mamdani wearing an apron but no shirt in what appears to be a halal cart in the Canary Mission video above, here's the source of the imagery: the video for a different Mamdani hip-hop song, called "Nani." In it, the acclaimed actress and cookbook author Madhur Jaffrey plays a foul-mouthed grandmother who's also a crime boss (with a doctorate). Enjoy.

at

Wednesday, June 25, 2025

GO BIG OR GO HOME, DEMOCRATS (updated)

It's fascinating to me that Zohran Mamdani's upset victory in the New York Democratic mayoral primary took place less than 24 hours after congressional Democrats congratulated themselves in the media for shutting down an impeachment effort against President Trump:
House Democrats privately vented their fury Tuesday about what they said is a "premature" and "unhelpful" vote on impeaching President Trump for his strikes on Iran.

... 128 Democrats sided with House Republicans to block Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) from bringing a Trump impeachment vote, including most of Democratic leadership.
Obviously, a successful impeachment vote can't happen in a Republican-controlled House. And maybe Democrats shouldn't cast even a symbolic vote to impeach Trump in response to U.S. attack on a country that's a global bad actor and domestically repressive, especially to women. But Democrats proudly shut down an impeachment effort last month by Michigan congressman Shri Thanedar, on different issues. Maybe they shouldn't be trying to impeach the president at all, given the two-thirds threshold for conviction in the Senate, which will probably make removal impossible even if Trump's poll numbers plummet and Democrats take both houses of Congress in 2026, but they don't have to act pleased with themselves when they stifle this kind of outrage. And maybe they should be targeting other members of the administration -- Robert Kennedy Jr., for instance, who seems to have lied to a U.S. senator about keeping a vaccine advisory committee in place, or possibly Pete Hegseth after those security breaches. Why not unite on votes impeach them, even if the votes fail? What's the downside? You might alienate pro-polio or pro-security breach voting blocs?

The connection between this and yesterday's primary results in New York is that millions of Americans want to believe that someone is fighting to change the direction of our politics. Mamdani won because he gave Democratic primary voters in New York a reason to hope that the same old evil bastards might not run everything forever. National Democrats need to give the rest of America a sense that another world is possible. They need to be bold and defiant and take actions that are visceral and compelling, even if they're risky. They don't necessarily need to have the charisma of Mamdani -- Chris Van Hollen is a soft-spoken senator, but his trip to see Kilmar Abrego Garcia changed the immigration narrative, forced Abrego Garcia's repatriation, and began the process of pushing Trump's poll numbers on immigration underwater. More like that, please.

I'm seeing takes on Mamdani's victory that reinforce the same-old-same-old approach of the Democratic establishment:


But Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries shouldn't look at Mamdani's win and think, Ignoring everything but the economy and promising to preserve the economic status quo is the key to success. That wasn't Mamdani's approach. He made big promises: a rent freeze, free city buses, city-run grocery stores. More important, he ran against the elite -- the real elite.


And he couldn't avoid getting dragged into culture wars -- he was relentlessly accused of wanting to "defund the police," an approach he now rejects, and he's regularly (and falsely) portrayed as an anti-Semite and terrorist sympathizer. He won anyway.

Democrats are looking for a way forward, but many of them, including some I admire, like Chris Murphy, seem to believe that they're doomed to failure if they don't identify the correct spot on the political grid with pinpoint accuracy. Being overly analytical in this way is not the answer. Reject business as usual. Offer hope for a significantly different future. Take risks.

Democrats don't have to be perfect They have to make voters believe they care. They have to show that they're as impatient with the status quo as voters are.

*****

UPDATE: Will the Murdoch press now try to revive the career the scandal-plagued current mayor, Eric Adams, in a desperate attempt to prevent Mamdani's election in November? I think so. (Adams will be on the general election ballot as an independent.) A New York Post editorial says:
This is certainly an opportunity for Mayor Eric Adams, who’s right now low in the polls thanks to his uneven first-term performance and a taint of corruption mainly created at the behest of a White House furious that he called out some obvious failings of a president who the nation now knows was unfit for the office.

Maybe Adams can come back roaring off the mat....
Yes, the Post is all in on the narrative "Biden's White House directly intervened to secure the indictment of the poor, innocent mayor of New York, a member of Biden's own party, because ... reasons."

Adams was on Fox & Friends this morning:
Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani is one step closer to becoming New York City’s next mayor, but current Mayor Eric Adams believes voters won’t be fooled.

"He’s a snake oil salesman," Adams said on "Fox & Friends" Wednesday. "He would say and do anything to get elected."
Cuomo will also have an independent ballot line available to him, but my guess now is that he won't run -- he'll be encouraged not to, in the hope that Murdoch and Cuomo's fat-cat donors can rehabilitate Adams (and do a more effective job of demonizing Mamdani). It probably won't work, but I think they'll try.
at

Tuesday, June 24, 2025

FOR TRUMP, IT'S NOT SEPTEMBER 12

I thought America might rally around President Trump after he ordered bombs dropped on Iranian nuclear sites. I imagined that might happen because I've seen the American public's response to previous Republican wars -- not just the ones we fought after the 9/11 attacks, but also the ones we fought when Americans clearly weren't in imminent danger (Grenada, Panama, the first Iraq war). In the recent past, Americans have trusted Republicans when they said military force was necessary, at least at first. Republicans were seen as manly and heroic. Their patriotism was seen as pure. Their wars were portrayed as pure good versus pure evil. Americans believed Republican presidents, even when (in the case of Grenada, for instance) they had no idea why the hell we were fighting.

That isn't happening now, and I'm not sure Trump's cease-fire will help, even if it eventually holds. Yesterday we read a YouGov poll showing that 46% of Americans disapprove of the bombing and only 35% approve. CNN's numbers are worse for Trump:
Americans disapprove of the strikes, 56% to 44%, according to the survey, with strong disapproval outpacing the share who strongly approve....

Majorities of independents (60%) and Democrats (88%) disapprove of the decision to take military action in Iran. Republicans largely approve (82%). But just 44% of Republicans strongly approve of the airstrikes, far smaller than the group of Democrats who strongly disapprove (60%), perhaps reflecting that some in Trump’s coalition are broadly distrustful of military action abroad.

A 58% majority overall say the strikes will make Iran more of a threat to the US, with just 27% believing it will lessen the threat and the rest expecting it to do neither. Even among those who support the strikes, just 55% expect them to lessen the threat level.
Some of this seems to be Trump-specific.
Just over half of Americans, 55%, expresses little or no trust in Trump to make the right decisions about the US use of force in Iran, with 45% saying they trust him moderately or a great deal.
Even Americans who trust Trump on some issues appear not to trust him on this one. I think he might have had a chance of winning the public over, as Ronald Reagan and the Bushes did, if he seemed capable of gravitas. But he always seems jittery, impetuous, and whiny. Unlike past Republican presidents, he can't seem to suspend those qualities even for a short time during a crisis. He never seems like a steady hand on the tiller, the way past Republicans did, even if appearances were deceiving. This was Trump after the cease-fire was declared and then challenged:


On the campaign trail in 2024, Trump maximally overpromised: Vote for Kamala Harris and get World War III, vote for Trump and get world peace instantly. Did anyone outside the GOP base believe that Trump would arrive at this goal through steadiness? No -- if they believed him, they thought he'd be the clever dealmaker, and also the tough guy who pursued "peace through strength." They knew he had one mode -- extremely volatile -- but they hoped he'd be so volatile that he'd frighten the rest of the world and we'd never need to fight, or he'd end wars through shrewdness. (Look, don't blame me for these characterizations -- I'm just trying to imagine the positive qualities that non-base voters might see in Trump.)

Trump didn't intimidate or outnegotiate Iran. Instead, he chose violence. His promise to swing voters was that he'd have no reason to do that.

So no one's rallying around him. According to opinion polls, he was already underwater on foreign policy (-11.2, according to Real Clear Polling). And now he's desperate to declare victory and demand a Nobel Prize. It's not a good look.

In a way, it's COVID all over again -- his need to be praised, and to be reassured that there's no danger anymore thanks to him, is the same as it was then. At least he hasn't screwed this up as much as he screwed up the pandemic (so far).
at

Monday, June 23, 2025

WILL DEMOCRATS BE TOO HIGH-MINDED TO RESPOND TO YOUNG PEOPLE'S WAR FEARS?

On the U.S. bombing of Iraqi nuclear sites, there's a massive generation gap:


Some of this is a fear that they'll be cannon fodder, as a young congressional candidate and former Media Matters journalist notes:


But the Big Brain response to this isn't "Democrats should show they're on the side of the young." It's "The young are idiots to worry about this."


If only we could determine where young men developed the preposterous idea that they're at risk of being drafted...


What are Trump's plans for the military? What are his limits? Trump has hinted at using the military in Mexico and Canada and Greenland while launching strikes against Iran and deploying troops on U.S. soil. Where's his limit? What are you certain he won't do?

And what happens if there's a major terrorist attack against Americans? What do you think Trump will do? Can you list the guardrails you're certain will hold?

Sure, we haven't had a draft since the 1970s. But we haven't had a president like second-term Trump, or a cabinet like his collection of amateurs, fanatics, conspiratorialists, and traitors, in American history. I don't blame young people for believing there are no limits to what can happen. Democrats should try to make it clear that they don't want to fight half the world and don't want to militarize America. They should oppose a draft for every deployment of military force Trump has ever mentioned or suggested. But I'm sure they'll listen to all the smart people who say that only idiots would worry about a raving lunatic in the Oval Office doing something irrational.
at

Sunday, June 22, 2025

TO YOUR RIGHT-WING NEIGHBORS, THIS WILL BE TRUMP'S WAR ONLY IF IT WORKS

Vox's Joshua Keating says that President Trump can't evade responsibility for what happens now that American forces have bombed Iraninan nuclear facilities.
President Donald Trump claimed during his 2024 campaign for president that America had fought “no wars” during his first presidency, and that he was the first president in 72 years who could say that.

This was not, strictly speaking, true. In his first term, Trump intensified the air war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, ordered airstrikes against Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime in response to chemical weapons use, and escalated a little-noticed counterinsurgency campaign in Somalia. But in those cases, Trump could say, with some justification, that he was just dealing with festering crises he had inherited from Barack Obama.

Likewise, the president has repeatedly claimed that the wars in Gaza and Ukraine never would have happened had he been president when they broke out, rather than Joe Biden.... it’s fair to say that both are wars Trump inherited rather than chose.

This time, it’s different. This time, it’s Trump’s war....

It’s quite a gamble – and this time he will have no one else to blame if it doesn’t go as planned.
Oh, he'll find someone to blame -- the two people you'd expect him to blame. And every Republican in America will agree with him.

At this moment, most Republicans are backing Trump. A handful of Republicans -- Marjorie Taylor Greene, for instance -- are opposed to this intervention.


But ask any Republican, especially rank-and-file Republicans, about Iran, and the first thing you'll hear is that Barack Obama made a horrible deal with Iran and both Obama and Joe Biden were appeasers who tossed money at Iran strictly because Democrats are evil traitors who always want to help America's enemies.


That's been Trump's line for many years.


In a speech in Saudi Arabia last month, Trump said,
The Biden administration's extreme weakness and gross incompetence derailed progress toward peace, destabilized the region and put at risk everything we had worked so hard to build together.
Specifically:
They lifted sanctions on Iran in exchange for getting nothing and sent the regime tens of billions of dollars to fund terror and death all over the world. And they laughed at him, they laughed at our leader and they're still laughing at our leader.

They thought him a fool and they made nothing but trouble ever since....
Much of the money that Trump and other Republicans talk about consisted of Iranian assets that were unfrozen with strict conditions imposed. But right-wingers don't care, just as they don't care about the effectiveness of the nuclear deal that Obama negotiated and Trump scrapped in his first term.


They'll blame Obama and Biden (and Jimmy Carter) if Trump's intervention leads to bad consequences. But if there's a good outcome, Trump will get the credit.

*****

UPDATE: And there you go...

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Saturday, June 21, 2025

YOUR RIGHT-WING NEIGHBORS STILL DON'T BELIEVE THE MINNESOTA SHOOTER WAS A CONSERVATIVE IDEOLOGUE

Prominent right-wing figures who tried to portray the recent Minnesota shootings as left-on-left violence have been widely criticized. Senator Mike Lee, one of the worst offenders, took down tweets implying that the shooter was a "Marxist" (a right-wing euphemism for "Democrat") and implicating Governor Tim Walz in the murder plan.

But the right won't let this go. Yesterday, Alpha News, a Minnesota site with ties to GOP-affiliated groups, reported this:
Assassination suspect Vance Boelter wrote a letter in which he blamed Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz for the murderous rampage Boelter committed, according to sources.

Multiple sources with direct knowledge of the investigation have confirmed to Alpha News that Boelter’s so-called confession letter was intended for Kash Patel, the director of the FBI.
A later story in The Minnesota Star Tribune offered clarification:
In a rambling, conspiratorial letter addressed to the FBI, alleged assassin Vance Boelter claimed Gov. Tim Walz instructed him to kill U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar so that Walz could run for the U.S. Senate, according to two people familiar with the contents of the letter.

The letter ... is incoherent, one and a half pages long, confusing and hard to read, according to two people familiar with the letter’s contents. It includes Boelter alleging he had been trained by the U.S. military off the books, and that Walz, who is not running for Senate, had asked him to kill Klobuchar and others.
Some right-wing influencers are taking the allegation against Walz literally.


Others are being more "responsible" -- which, to right-wingers, means acknowledging that Walz had nothing to do with the shootings, but also arguing that a guy who shot several Democrats and wanted to shoot many more couldn't possibly have had a political motive and was just a sad, apolitical insane person.

Townhall:
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) even tried to cast Boelter as a crazed right-winger. That narrative quickly fell apart due to a lack of evidence. Also, left-wingers are the ones driving today’s political violence—evidence to that effect is overwhelming.
PJMedia:
There is no evidence that support for Trump or any conservative cause motivated Boelter’s actions. Instead, his violent spree was rooted in a deranged fixation on Walz, a far cry from the media’s initial narrative that sought to weaponize the tragedy against the pro-Trump right.

In short, Boelter is just a wacko. His letter is a testament to his fractured mind, not a manifesto of political grievance. The media’s rush to blame conservatives and the governor’s passive complicity in allowing false narratives to spread are failures that demand scrutiny.
And what's the result of this? COVER-UP! Here's RedState:
Details about a letter written by Minnesota assassin Vance Boelter have been released, and they paint a much clearer picture of his state of mind and why he did what he did. They also give a pretty good indication of why this story disappeared from the news so quickly.
And more from PJMedia:
This deliberate misinformation campaign explains why the story vanished from the headlines so quickly. Once the facts emerged, the narrative that fit the media’s partisan agenda collapsed. The silence that followed speaks volumes about the lengths to which some will go to manipulate public perception and exploit tragedy for political gain.
Yes, evil liberals are trying to bury the story of the Minnesota shootings, and the evidence is reporting on new developments in the story that appeared in the state's most prominent newspaper.

Why isn't this still the biggest story in America? Because this is America. I have a rule of thumb about this rage-saturated (and gun-saturated) country: We're so desensitized to violence that stories like these drop out of the headlines almost immediately if fewer than five people are killed. At this point, the correct number might be ten. But in this sick country, two dead is nothing.

I'll make an exception for an incident involving the president or a current presidential candidate -- or, because we live in a plutocracy, a prominent CEO. Otherwise, these stories fade fast.

David French, a conservative evangelical, has no problem linking Boelter's ideology to the deeds he's accused of:
Boelter’s roommate identified him as a President Trump-supporting Republican, and Boelter voted in the 2024 Republican primary. And he wasn’t just a Republican. He was also a 1990 graduate of the Dallas-based Christ for the Nations Institute and engaged in missionary activities in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where he delivered exuberant sermons that soon appeared online.

In other words, Boelter wasn’t just a political assassin; he was a Christian assassin — and a person deeply connected to one of America’s most radical religious movements.

Christ for the Nations isn’t a staid, traditional seminary. It opened its doors in 1970. One of its founders was an extremist Pentecostal pastor named James Gordon Lindsay, who was part of a spiritual movement called the New Order of the Latter Rain.

... elements of Latter Rain are now part of a movement called the New Apostolic Reformation, or N.A.R.

... The New Apostolic Reformation — and its close cousin, the independent charismatic movement — houses the most radical Christian Trumpists. Deeply influenced by prophecy, they see Trump as divinely destined to save America from the godless left and its political party, the “demoncrats,” who are doing Satan’s bidding here on earth.
Even if, for some reason, Boelter thought he was acting on behalf of Walz, his target list was unquestionably ideological, as even the reporter covering the story for Alpha News acknowledges.


in 2023, Walz signed a bill enshrining reproductive rights in Minnesota state law. Did Boelter not know that? Did he not pay attention to the pro-choice Kamala Harris/Tim Walz presidential campaign? And if all this was done so Walz could run for Senate, why shoot two state legislators? They weren't impediments to a Walz run. And in any case, Walz has chosen not to run in 2026 for the Minnesota Senate seat that's being vacated by Tina Smith, who's retiring. Why would Walz want to take Klobuchar's seat if he doesn't want Smith's?

I wonder whether this note says what we're being told it says. If the reporting is accurate, I suspect the note was a clumsy attempt to shift blame to yet another Democratic enemy -- and now many of Boelter's fellow right-wingers appear to be persuaded.
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Friday, June 20, 2025

CLYBURN SIDES WITH CUOMO AND THE PLUTOCRACY

This is regrettable:
Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, a veteran lawmaker who was once the highest-ranking Black member of Congress, will endorse former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Friday....

“The mayor of New York is uniquely positioned to play an important role in the future of the national Democratic Party,” Mr. Clyburn said in a statement, adding that Mr. Cuomo had the “experiences, credentials and character to not just serve New York, but also help save the nation.”
Yes, Clyburn praised Cuomo's "character."

This is part of the cold civil war in and around the Democratic Party:
The endorsement comes three days after Mr. Cuomo’s main rival, Zohran Mamdani, was endorsed by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont....

Mr. Sanders has also placed the race in a national context, arguing that Mr. Mamdani represents a break from ”corporate-dominated politics driven by billionaires.”

Mr. Clyburn does not often take sides in Democratic primaries, but he did so in a 2021 congressional race in Ohio to help defeat an acolyte of Mr. Sanders.
In that race, Clyburn endorsed Shontel Brown, who went on to win the seat after defeating the Sanders-wing candidate, Nina Turner. At the time, Clyburn offered his reasons for the endorsement:
He said his decision to back Ms. Brown, the chairwoman of the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party, was not about Mr. Sanders, or even Ms. Turner.... But he took a swipe at what he called the “sloganeering” of the party’s left flank, which has risen to power with calls for “Medicare for all,” and to “abolish ICE” and “defund the police.”

“What I try to do is demonstrate by precept and example how we are to proceed as a party,” Mr. Clyburn said in an interview. “When I spoke out against sloganeering, like ‘Burn, baby, burn’ in the 1960s and ‘defund the police,’ which I think is cutting the throats of the party, I know exactly where my constituents are. They are against that, and I’m against that.”
So moderation in all things? Not just public safety, but money issues?

Based on a new Reuters/Ipsos poll, I'd say Clyburn doesn't know exactly where his constituents are:
Some 62% of self-identified Democrats in the poll agreed with a statement that "the leadership of the Democratic Party should be replaced with new people." Only 24% disagreed....

The poll found a gap between what voters say they care about and what they think the party’s leaders prioritize. It was particularly wide on the issue of reducing corporate spending in political campaigns, where 73% of Democrats said they viewed putting limits on contributions to political groups like Super PACs a priority, but only 58% believed party leaders prioritize that....

Along that line, 86% of Democrats said changing the federal tax code so wealthy Americans and large corporations pay more in taxes should be a priority, more than the 72% of those surveyed think party leaders make it a top concern....

Democratic respondents said the party should be doing more to promote affordable childcare, reduce the price of prescription drugs, make health insurance more readily available and support mass transit. They view party leaders as less passionate about those issues than they are, the poll found.
Universal healthcare is a priority for more than 80% of Democratic voters. Maybe some of these voters would reject "Medicare for All," but they share the goal. They want to tax the rich more. They want affordable childcare. They want lower Medicare drug prices. click to enlarge:


It seems to me that Democratic voters want an economic agenda that's not incrementalist, which explains why Mamdani isn't being rejected in New York as a wild-eyed radical.

When we talk about this, we tend to bundle economic populism with "wokeness" -- on trans athletes, for instance, or on policing. Establishmentarians like Clyburn tell us that the vast majority of Americans reject it all. But if you don't look at the facts that way, you see a country where many people want to reduce the power of the obscenely wealthy and give more of a break to ordinary people, and they don't see that as necessarily connected to "wokeness." Reuters tells us:
Just 17% of Democrats said allowing transgender people to compete in women and girls’ sports should be a priority, but 28% of Democrats think party leaders see it as such.

Benjamin Villagomez, 33, of Austin, Texas said that while trans rights are important, the issue too easily lends itself to Republican attacks.

“There are more important things to be moving the needle on,” said Villagomez, who is trans. “There are more pressing issues, things that actually matter to people’s livelihoods.”
Of course, Clyburn might not really care about the non-economic issues he mentioned in 2021. He might just want to keep big-money donations flowing to the Democrats. After all, this endorsement comes in the same week that this story appeared:
Just months into the tenure of a new party leader, Ken Martin, the Democratic National Committee’s financial situation has grown so bleak that top officials have discussed whether they might need to borrow money this year to keep paying the bills.

Fund-raising from major donors — some of whom Mr. Martin has still not spoken with — has slowed sharply....

Six people briefed on the party’s fund-raising, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss its finances frankly, said big donors — who are an essential part of the party’s funding — had been very slow to give to the party this year....
Establishment Democrats don't want to upset billionaire donors -- but they'll lose many of their voters if they insist on mollifying the rich at all costs. Cuomo is the candidate of the plutocracy. If the party continues to favor politicians like him, it might please donors, but it might not have much of a voter base in the future.
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Thursday, June 19, 2025

NO REAL CHANGE, PLEASE -- WE'RE CORPORATISTS

There have been several recent editorials in the major newspapers about the New York mayor's race, which appears to be a two-person contest between thuggish sex pest Andrew Cuomo and charismatic but inexperienced social democrat Zohran Mamdani -- but this editorial, from The Washington Post's David Von Drehle, gets right to the point about what the corporatists who hope to maintain control of the Democratic Party in perpetuity really want:
For Democratic Party malaise in the age of Donald Trump, proposed cures are a dime a dozen. But a couple of ideas stand out. Find some fresh, inspiring candidates to replace the 20th-century relics. And put the kibosh on left-wing ideas associated with decline and disorder in some of America’s bluest cities.
There you go: The Democratic Party desperately needs fresh blood -- but please, no "left-wing ideas"!

Von Drehle cites a New York Times editorial published on Monday that begins with Murdochian scare tactics and doesn't get much better after that:
Many longtime New Yorkers have had a sinking feeling at some point in the past decade. They have worried that their city was heading back to the bad old days of the 1970s and ’80s.

Subway trips can have a chaotic or even menacing quality. Nearly half of bus riders board without paying their fares. The number of felony assaults has jumped more than 40 percent over the past decade. The city’s fourth graders, after significantly outperforming their peers in other large cities during the early 2000s, have fallen back in math and reading. Housing has become even less affordable, and homelessness has risen. In the most basic measure of the city’s appeal, the population remains well below its pre-Covid peak.

We believe that New York is the world’s most dynamic and important city, thanks to its energy, diversity, creativity, prosperity and history. And though some of the complaints about the city today are overstated, we are also worried. The quality of life has deteriorated over the past decade. On some issues, like crime rates, the city has recovered modestly over the past few years, and it remains in far better shape than it was 50 years ago. Still, New Yorkers deserve better than the status quo.
"Some of the complaints about the city today are overstated"? Then why begin by validating the fears of those who believe the city is as dysfunctional and dangerous as it was at its worst in the late twentieth century? New York City had more than a thousand murders every year from 1969 through 1995. It had more than two thousand murders in 1990 and again in 1991. But there hasn't been a year with even five hundred murders in the city since 2011. Crime in the seven major categories is down more than 72% since 1993.

The Times editorial was apparently written in a state of desperation: Mamdani continues to rise in the polls, and denunciations of him don't seem to be working, so the editorial shifts to a different tactic: portraying Mamdani as the second coming of the widely reviled Bill de Blasio.
New York needs a mayor who understands why the past decade has been disappointing. Crucial to that understanding is an acknowledgment that a certain version of progressive city management has failed, in New York and elsewhere.... At the municipal level, this liberalism was skeptical of if not hostile to law enforcement. It argued that schools needed more money and less evaluation. It blamed greedy landlords for high rents, instead of emphasizing the crucial role of housing supply.

Bill de Blasio, whose eight-year tenure as New York’s mayor began in 2014, came from this wing of the Democratic Party. And he had some successes, including his expansion of preschool and his curtailment of widespread stop-and-frisk policing. Overall, though, he bears significant responsibility for the city’s problems. He did not take disorder seriously enough, and he set back the city’s K-12 school system. His main legacy is to have contributed to the city’s recent decline.
We're told that de Blasio "did not take disorder seriously enough" and "contributed to the city’s recent decline," but do you know which years had New York's fewest murders in living memory? The years 2017 and 2018. New York had fewer than three hundred murders in each of those years, for the first time since World War II. Do you know who was mayor then? Bill de Blasio.

Also, when the editorial says, "The number of felony assaults has jumped more than 40 percent over the past decade," it's comparing 2024 figures to figures in 2014 -- when de Blasio was mayor.

But the editorial gives the game away when it defends greedy landlords and underfunding of schools: This is an effort to persuade voters not to try to move the Democratic Party of the Second Gilded Age to the left economically. The ed board's ideal candidate would be a Chuck Schumer with Mamdani's charisma -- or Cuomo himself without the baggage.

I expect Cuomo to win the primary. If he doesn't, he'll have a third-party ballot line in the general election. Mamdani might be on the ballot as the Working Families Party candidate if he loses the Democratic primary.

If both Cuomo and Madani are on the November ballot, I expect an even more brutal smear campaign against Mamdani than we've seen in the primary. And on whose behalf? Well, let me show you a campaign mailer I received this week...


The billionaires want to retain control of the Democratic Party and New York City -- and the ed board of The New York Times wants that too.
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