Month: July 2020

 

From Jonathan Bernstein:

Amid grim polls and a worsening economy, the president needs a quick recovery to save his re-election bid.

Sunday marked 100 days until the election, so I’ll break my general rule of thumb — which is to ignore the horse-race polls until after the conventions — for a day. And what those polls say is pretty simple: Former Vice President Joe Biden has opened up a solid lead over President Donald Trump.

How solid? Checking the averages: FiveThirtyEight estimates an 8 percentage point lead, RealClearPolitics says 9.1 percentage points and the Economist puts it at 8.4 percentage points. How big is that lead? Big enough. Even if the polls are a bit off and Trump is actually doing better, and even if he still has an Electoral College advantage and everything breaks in his favor, there’s no way he wins if the polls look this way in November.

But of course it’s July, not November. The good news for Trump is that despite everything that’s gone wrong, even a modest rally would put him close enough that a normal polling error and an Electoral College edge could be enough to win a second term.

The bad news for him is that it seems unlikely he can do that.

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From Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger:

Donald Trump has been insistent on having an in-person convention with thousands of adoring Republican fans.

When North Carolina would not guarantee he could do that, he moved the convention to Jacksonville, Florida — and continued to brag about the size of the crowd he expected.

On Thursday, he suddenly did an about-face, and cancelled the Jacksonville convention. He said his aides and campaign staff were assuring him the convention would be great, but he told them “it’s not the right time for that”. He went on to say, “There’s nothing more important in our country than keeping our people safe”.

Do you believe that?

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From The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser:

I am often accused by readers of misrepresenting Evangelicals in my writing; that my descriptions and criticisms of Evangelicalism don’t apply to a reader’s sect, their church, or to them personally. I have heard, more times than I can count, Evangelicals say: my church is different, my pastor is different, my denomination is different, my college is different, I’m DIFFERENT, DIFFERENT, DIFFERENT! While it is certainly true that not all Evangelicals are the same, often the alleged differences are little more than the differences between ice cream flavors. Same basic ingredients with different flavors and toppings. Evangelicals can whine, bitch, moan, and complain about my writing, but the fact remains that I was part of the Christian church for 50 years, an Evangelical pastor for 25 of those years, have Evangelical family members — including pastors, evangelists, and missionaries — and closely follow the machinations of the Evangelical community. I am confident that I have a good handle on Evangelical beliefs and practices.

Over the years, I have perused the doctrinal statements of numerous Evangelical sects, churches, and parachurch organizations. The agreement I find in these documents allows me to conclude what it is that Evangelicals believe. Add to that the fact that I pastored six Evangelical churches, and I think I have a good handle on the “faith once delivered to the saints.”

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From driftglass:

If you were to listen to Friday’s podcast from Never Trump world headquarters (you really, really shouldn’t) you might be excited but confused to learn that Bulwark founder Charlie Sykes and Bulwark editor-at-large Bill Kristol have pooled their mighty predictive powers in order to peer into the mists of the not-too-distant future and declare that they perceive the emergence of a New Vital Ideological Center!

Which shouldn’t surprise anyone since the Conservative Brain Caste has made a cottage industry out of predicting the imminent arrival of a new Sensible Center and/or Conservative Renaissance every few months for a several decades now. Hell, just a couple of years ago, Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times confidently predicted that the field marshal of the coming Conservative golden age would be the same shitbag who wrote “Liberal Fascism” —

— so honestly, I barely bother to keep score anymore.

However today is a little different because today the leaders of Never Trump HQ have so perfectly fulfilled my two-bit prediction of what tactics they would use to weasel out of accountability for the evil that they have done I felt duty bound to bring it to your attention.

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• Sarah Cooper shows us how to Person Woman Man Camera TV:
   

  How to person woman man camera tv pic.twitter.com/rcQC4sxmLX

  — Sarah Cooper (@sarahcpr) July 24, 2020

• Well, that wasn’t bright. A Republican primary candidate writes an anti‑abortion‑rights piece and asks Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson to run it in the on‑line publication he edits. Despite reservations about publishing a campaign piece, Wigderson agrees, but suggests a couple of minor changes for clarity and style. The candidate then goes public, angrily accusing the publication of censorship.
   
  Result? How about an article telling the world the candidate is a liar? Sounds like a sort of substitute for my president’s minimal cognitive test. If a candidate can’t pass it, he’s not up to the job. Or much of any job.
   
• Max’s Dad takes a position on the AOC vs TY conflict. Ty Yoho ambushes Alexandria Ocasio‑Cortez on the steps of a Congressional Building, yelling that she is “disgusting” and that “You are out of your freaking mind.” Seems she had suggested a link between crime rates and poverty rates. As she walks away, he calls her a “****ing bitch” (Sorry – Just couldn’t print it).
   
  Without naming her, Yoho later apologized for the “abrupt” nature of his conversation. That’s the word he used. Abrupt. So Representative Ocasio‑Cortez pretty much ripped out his liver and fed it to him. Max’s Dad cheers her on.
   
  Some pundits later accused Yoho of rank lying, denying that he called his colleague (aw what the hell) a “fucking bitch” (Sorry, Aunt Tildy). For the record, he did not actually deny saying that. He denied saying it to her. Max’s Dad gets it right. Yoho “who like most right wing chickenshits” called her what he called her “behind her back” as she walked away. He didn’t have the courage to say it to her face.
   
• So David Brooks protests changing standards of discourse and what constitutes offense. John Scalzi at Whatever examines his prime example, that the great Christopher Hitchens would never get published today, and commits withering vivisection on the argument.
   
• North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz meets thousands of people who recoil from Christianity, sickened by its insidious influence in our political system; who see it as a toxic presence in our nation—one that serves only to divide and perpetuate inequity and inflict injury.
   
  His message to those horrified by current Christian perversions: many of us are with you: and so is Jesus.

Continue reading “Trump Cognate, Christianity, White Privilege, Pandemucate, Police State”

 
From News Corpse:

Trump is currently juggling multiple crises, including a raging pandemic that has already taken the lives of more than 143,000 Americans, civil unrest across the nation, economic recession and historic unemployment, and the only problems that Trump actually care about, his disintegrating public image and the approaching presidential election.

So naturally Trump has made a typically tone-deaf, self-serving, executive decision to inflame more racial animus. On Thursday morning he tweeted that…

It’s notable that Trump’s tweet attempts to appeal to an archaic demographic of “Suburban Housewives,” a degrading label that died decades ago along with anachronisms like “the little woman.” But more importantly, Trump is brazenly trying to frighten suburban women and families with thinly veiled inferences to marauding hordes of dark people moving into their exclusive neighborhoods.

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From Strangely Blogged:

So, you take a guy who is just weirdly litigious for absurd right-wing/misogynous causes, like being against Ladies’ Nights at bars and clubs. Huh. Seems merely eccentric and meninist. Such a person seems pretty human-interest-y, right? But now this same person is suspected of targeting the family of a judge, killing her son and injuring her husband. and also seems to have thousands of pages of hate that he has written about. Keeping in mind the carnage of Eliot Rodger and other MRA-affiliated killers, it seems pretty likely that misogyny was a big part of his intention to kill, and it no longer seems funny or eccentric.

Fox News had Mr. Den Hollander on occasionally, which isn’t a surprise, because the entire network is pretty antifeminist. Which you can kind of tell not just because of the programing, but because of the rape culture it has pretty much always been a big enabler of. Like, Roger Ailes–mad sexual harassment. Or Bill O’Reilly. Insane sexual harassment. Or just everyday sexual harassment. Or Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson-related sexual harassment with Ed Henry being a rapist. It’s just always a part of the FOX culture, apparently. And it looks as if promoting a view that women are a suspect class of potential feminazis of delinquent values might result in violence against them.

But conservatives in real life mirror these stupid, dangerous, anti-women values, as well. So Ted Yoho calls AOC a “fucking bitch”.

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From The Propaganda Professor:

Right-wingers, as we’ve observed, are obsessed with rewriting history to cast themselves in a more favorable light. Inevitably, this includes trying to whitewash the movement’s core of racism and white nationalism — and in the process diverting attention elsewhere and saying “no, it’s really the other guys who are racists”. In this connection, they focus on the fact that 150 years ago or so, it was the Democratic Party that championed slavery, and the Republican Party that fought to eliminate it. What they ignore is that the two parties bearing those names back then bore no resemblance to the respective parties thus named today. Actually, they don’t just ignore this; they vehemently deny it when someone brings it up. Two particular phrases, closely connected, have been the targets of their denial: “party switch” and “Southern Strategy”.

“Party switch” refers to the idea that the G.O.P. of today more closely resembles the Democratic Party of yore (particularly on matters of race), and vice versa. In an effort to poo-poo this, right-wingers have narrowly defined “party switch” as the act of having a large number of politicians literally switch parties in a short space of time. And this, they correctly point out, did not happen.

Trouble is, that’s not really what “party switch” refers to in this context. It means that the respective parties began to change their platforms to attract different kinds of politicians and different kinds of voters. And that definitely did occur.

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From Green Eagle:

The bridge is currently named the Edmund Pettus bridge. I have heard that name practically my whole live, but never had a clue who Edmund Pettus was. Today I decided to find out. Here’s a historical account from The Smithsonian Magazine:

“Pettus was regarded as a hero in his native state and adopted hometown of Selma, a lawyer and statesman who served as a U.S. senator.”

Well, that’s nice. Naming bridges after heroes, a long tradition. And what did he do as “a lawyer and a statesman” to earn the respect of his people?

“…he was also a decorated Confederate general and a leader in the Alabama Ku Klux Klan.”

Oh. Not quite so good, I’d say.

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