At this year's first presidential debate, one candidate stumbled, the other repeatedly lied. CBS News correspondent
@jdickerson
, anchor of "The Daily Report," considers the next steps in an election in which President Biden has declared democracy itself is on the ballot.
If Sasha Baron Cohen had guts, he’d do a Borat sequel where Borat goes to the Ivy League. He won’t have much trouble getting students and faculty to join in a rendition of “Throw the Jew Down the Well.”
If McCormick pulls it out and wins the general election, one lesson from the example of him and Glenn Youngkin is that "Mitt Romney with culture-war cred" can be a winning formula for the GOP in purple states.
1. Last week,
@Target
announced it was closing 9 stores due to theft, generating an avalanche of credulous coverage from nearly every major media outlet
One thing that was missing from all these stories: DATA
So Popular Information tracked it down
🧵
As PJ O’Rourke wrote at the time the Wall came down, the most amazing accomplishment of Communism was that it managed to impoverish a nation of Germans.
Lots of people boosting Sotomayor’s florid dissent lines, not enough people doing the same for how Roberts - as the kids say - “claps back” in the majority opinion:
“We know the assassination attempt on Brett Kavanaugh took place in a climate of years-long escalating delegitimization and baseless attacks led by the media and Democratic politicians, as well as escalating campaigns against the conservative Justices…”
You can argue that political figures from both sides suffer from political violence, often from mentally unstable people. But only one side really seems to enjoy themselves when it happens.
Seeing a lot of freaking out right now among SCOTUS expert types that the court is going to delay Trump’s federal trial till after the election by keeping this immunity case going… 🥶
GOP Math:
1) No one can win the GOP nomination without appealing to a substantial number of Trump voters. Major problem for Haley.
2) No GOP nominee can win a general election without appealing to a substantial number of Haley voters. Major problem for Trump.
Personally I believe the leaker should be disbarred and never work in the legal profession again, regardless of whether it turns out to have been a liberal or conservative.
I’ll repeat: whoever advised Columbia’s president to beg off that Congressional hearing literally deserves a bonus larger than Shohei Ohtani’s contract.
To my liberal friends or followers: I am *begging* you not to take your lead on SCOTUS matters from Ian Millhiser or Mark Joseph Stern. Each of these men spew constant combinations of ignorance & bad faith. The mix varies but the result will almost always leave you less informed.
Three of these stories (NBC, Politico, and Axios) went up smearing Thomas, and all seemed borne out of a viral Mark Joseph Stern tweet. Some stories have issued minor corrections, but most of these bad tweets (from outlets and reporters!) are still up.
11 days into the war, Hamas is still firing on central Israel. Their ability to target major cities remains. 6,500 rockets have been fired into Israel since last Saturday.
The media doesn’t understand how their piling on now actually reinforces their lack of credibility. “We’re only calling for Biden to get out because we want to defeat Trump.” Yes, we believe you.
But they’ve been acting as D activists all along - by politely playing it down when they felt it could be ignored and trying to push him out now that it can’t. The common goal has been that the journalists see their role as helping to defeat Trump, and that’s exactly the problem.
Thankfully after two years of disruption from a pandemic that killed more than 1 mil Americans, schools are already working on helping kids recover and thrive. This is a year to accelerate learning by rebuilding relationships, focusing on the basics
It's kind of amazing that this article could be written without even *mentioning* the fact that a man who stated that he was motivated by these same concerns about SCOTUS rulings just attempted to assassinate Brett Kavanaugh.
@byelin
@philipaklein
For an indictment of a former President I don’t want to see any of the following words used to describe the charges: “novel,” “aggressive,” “unprecedented” and the like. I prefer charges like in the classified documents indictments where the operative phrase is “dead to rights.”
It’s almost as if many individuals who agree and have written extensively about the record of DOJ corruption - as well as the non existent substance of the Bragg indictment - are capable of distinguishing different types of evidence.
I’m stunned to see individuals who know the depth of DOJ corruption, who write about it, who tweet about it—give a shred of legitimacy to this indictment.
Every word of this
@bariweiss
missive. The phrase “meeting the moment” is so often used to describe some progressive gobbedlygook or counterproductive gesture; this is what the phrase means.
NEW
@PuckNews
: The Age of Biden: Many in WH press corps have spent the last couple years noticeably avoiding the topic of the president’s agility and acuity because it felt indelicate or irrelevant. Now, the Hur report has stirred some soul-searching.
We cannot allow this guy to resign. His entertainment Value Over Replacement Politician is off the charts. And unlike an unfit President, he’s not in a position to inflict that much damage even if he tries.
George Santos says he helped develop carbon capture technology, “I’ve had a very extensive role in the gas and oil in this country.”
#ResignGeorgeSantos
The white American woman billionaire who could end the genocide of Palestinians with on IG post is TIME Person of The Year.
White nonsense, white violence, white love of Black and brown genocide.
Biden is reading a NY Times fact check and
@Milbank
column to House Dems about how oil companies are more responsible for gas prices because they’re not using existing capacity - “don’t tell me gas prices are up because I’ve slowed down energy production”
EXCLUSIVE: Former Rep.
@WillHurd
(R-Texas) says he plans to decide whether to run for president in 2024 "very soon."
"I think the decision on anybody on their future in politics has to be done before Memorial Day."
A friend who would get in trouble for tweeting this under his or her own name, upon watching Biden’s statement: “His reading skills remain strong, I recommend we advance him to fifth grade.”
A friend who asked to remain nameless: "If you have lived in NYC for 23 years without ever encountering a half-naked lunatic on the subway, you're taking too many cabs."
Hi - New Yorker here. I’ve safely ridden the subway for 23 years and my child has never been menaced by a half naked lunatic, but these imaginary monsters in your head are addressable with therapy.
Another validation for my thesis that Vivek is the GOP’s Mayor Pete: he was never the biggest threat on the D side in 2020 but the other candidates, especially the blessed Klobuchar, could not stand him.
When did you first realize that the GOP was becoming an extremist, anti-democratic cult? For me it was way back in the 90s; people forget how many Rs refused to accept Clinton as legitimate and the proliferation of conspiracy theories 1/
Appalling as
@vijaya
has tackled a thankless task for
@jack
for a long time now and he should publicly support her and push back on this kind of toxicity. We saw your high-fives for Elon, Jack, and cool beans, but perhaps show a little respect and loyalty to her.
Whenever a lonely academic contemplates a career of drudgery and despairs of ever making a difference, s/he should remember Mark Tushnet’s “we won, they lost” article from 2016 and take heart: one academic - even with a lowly blog post - truly can change the world.
Get ready for a resumption of "GOP is only objecting to endless stimulus/anything else a D President wants because they want to destroy the economy/nihilism" discourse. It was ridiculous in the Obama era and will be more so now.
This is blindingly obvious, but worth stating over and over. A GOP house majority would have every incentive to do whatever possible to make the US economy worse in the run-up to 2024. The only reason *not* to do that is some sense of public duty, and I'm not holding my breath.
Very little chance this is true, given Roberts’ commitment to the Court’s institutional norms. Overwhelming chance is that this came from Sotomayor, and Roberts may be so angry he’ll join Alito’s opinion.
So that sounds a lot like someone from Team Roberts leaking to try to convince the other five that this is too much backlash and they should do the "Roe is effectively dead but we're not gonna say so clearly" strategy instead of this.
Even more amazing is that Casey overturned an Alito appeals court decision and Alito got to write the opinion overturning it 30 years later. Count of Monte Christo level.
One thing which I don't think has been noted enough is that the three Justices who crafted the compromise decision seeking to preserve abortion rights in Planned Parenthood v Casey (1992)—O'Connor, Souter, and Kennedy—have all lived to see its overturning.
I am begging people to think for literally three seconds about the ramifications of their positions. Honestly, two seconds should be enough to realize how crazy this position is.
The problem with this argument is that Aileen Cannon literally owes her job as a federal judge to Donald Trump, which is a massively greater conflict of interest than Merchan's, but no Trump supporters argued that she should recuse itself.
Why are they doing this? For the basest reason possible- to win a couple of cases. They are literally campaigning "that's a nice Supreme Court you got there, be a shame if something happened to it".
In any event, this is just not something they get any say over.
@redsteeze
Cannot wait for the inevitable endorsement of OG election results denier Stacey Abrams over the GOP governor who actually stopped Trump’s attempts to steal an election. Because protecting democracy requires it.
We did have something comparable over the summer, where a lefty tried to assassinate a conservative Supreme Court Justice specifically to try to stop the Dobbs decision. The “coverage” was…not this.
The thing I can’t stop thinking about is how different it would be if some far-left radical had tried to assassinate McConnell. It would be covered as devastating for Dems. They’d spend a week denouncing themselves. The midterms would be understood to be lost.
There may be no area where this is more true than legal media. The current crop of liberal legal maenads could not misinform their allies more if they were expressly devoted to doing so.
I have been trying for years to convince conservatives that while the mainstream media definitely leans left, at this point, that actually hurts Democrats at least as much as it helps.
I suspect that if a draft of the majority opinion in Obergefell had leaked and conservatives were protesting at the homes of the liberal justices, the tone of press coverage and official reaction from the D Admin spokesperson would’ve been slightly different.
My former colleague, the beloved
@miggyrod33
, died Monday at 47. I don’t know if he ever listened to Joe Rogan’s podcast; I do know that, with 900,000 Americans dead of Covid, the misinformation spread there is inexcusable. My column. No paywall.
I'm sorry but ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. All those walls closing in for so many years...
Breaking News: The prosecutors leading the Manhattan district attorney’s inquiry into Donald Trump have resigned. The D.A. is said to have doubts about the case.
Friends, I’ve decided that, after 20 years, I’m leaving
@cnn
after my vacation. Was great to spend my last day on air with pals Wolf, Anderson and Don. Love all my former colleagues. Watch for my next book, about the Oklahoma City bombing, coming in 2023 from
@simonandschuster
A partner at a firm I used to work at once suggested that we offer our billing system to all our competitors free of charge, so as to hobble them as much as it did us and thus level the playing field.
People yas-kweening the “with fear to our democracy” line from Sotomayor’s dissent are identifying themselves as people who should not be taken seriously.
I’m not certain many journalists quite grasp what a reputational catastrophe they have brought upon themselves by supporting the suppression of the Hunter Biden story at the time and preferring to let bygones be bygones now.
John Ganz: With Trump, you don’t get foreign policy experts, instead “schmucks off the street.”
Exactly. This is why he had the most successful Middle East policy in generations. The experts have a false worldview.
The key to these feigned displays of high-mindedness is that they are heavy on what Israel shouldn’t do but conspicuously light on recommendations for what it should do.
The decisions being made now are going to impact millions of lives, reverberate for generations, and risk all kinds of escalation. The U.S. should have learned from 9/11 the profound cost of being guided by anger and fear. I hope that is what we are telling the Israeli government
No joke: this may have been the most compressed lifecycle of lunatic academic theory in US history. From law review article to serving as basis for numerous court decisions to getting rejected 9-0 by SCOTUS took literally seven months.
Veteran FBI agents and whistleblowers have been sounding the alarm about corruption at the bureau’s highest levels for years. People who merely doubt their integrity are not acting unfairly at all.
Four years ago today, as the covid pandemic worsened, Trump sharpened his attacks on public health experts in a desperate attempt to convince people it was safe to reopen schools 👇
"Then I was trolling, now I'm super serious." Jonathan, we've been reading you for years. We know what your schtick is. That's why we've been reading you for so long. You're in a safe space here. You can admit it.
I wrote in my newsletter a couple months ago about how anti-anti-Trumpists are obsessed with that one, quickly retracted column I write before I took Trump seriously. Their obsession reveals more about them than me.
The greatest institutional counterrevolution of the last several decades is the Federalist Society and how it beat the liberal legal establishment at its own game.
Supreme Court commentators include some of the very worst journalists in the country: Lithwick, Mark Joseph Stern, Ian Millhiser and Elie Mystal all consistently produce a toxic brew of misinformation and emoting. They inevitably leave the readers less informed than before.
Speaking is
@Dahlialithwick
, Supreme Court reporter for
@Slate
, a rare example of a journalist with a beat who is openly critical of how her beat is covered.
The White House is doing to PPP what too many Rs are doing with Operation Warp Speed: redefining a policy triumph in such a way as to make it much less likely it will ever be repeated. Great job, guys. Hope you’re happy.
Dunno: taking sides against staffers who incite harassment against colleagues, pervert the meaning of journalism and levy demonstrably false claims seems like a perfectly appropriate thing for the NYT brass to do.
@maxwelltani
They're taking sides with this. They're playing dumb by pretending they're not, which is in itself lying to their staff and readers, but they are absolutely taking sides here.
This is pretty devastating, by
@baseballcrank
regarding a NYT hit job on Alito that is weak even by the standards of media hit jobs on conservative SCOTUS justices:
Donald Trump’s single-handed tanking of the Senate in the 2020 GA runoffs literally cost the country several trillion dollars, and that’s aside from all the bad nominees and judges who could have been blocked but got confirmed.
What Israel and the US are doing in real time to Palestinians activate very recent, unhealed trauma around Western violence against Africans, Black Americans, Native Americans, Muslims, and pretty much the entire Global South.
But they don’t want us to talk about that.
Top US law firm Davis Polk announces in an internal email that it had rescinded letters of employment for three law students at Harvard University and Columbia University who signed on to organizational statements regarding Israel.
Lady, you bought a multimillion dollar home a block from the Capitol within six months of getting elected and then lied to press about living in your office. Please.
Both of my daughters have been arrested over the past week for refusing to disperse at pro-ceasefire demonstrations in New York. I raised those girls right!
Venn diagram between those who are totally convinced that Alito’s flags equal belief in 1/6 & “Stop the Steal” and those who are equally convinced that protestors’ chants of “from the river to the sea” and “intifada” have multiple interpretations, mostly benign.
A succinct summary of the view that elections won by the GOP don’t count. (It helps that the factual assertions are false.) We’ll be hearing much more of this over the next couple of years.
Worth saying that the idea that this will be determined through the democratic process is a cruel joke since this Court has also systematically dismantled the federal protection of voting rights and fair representation from state lawmakers who seek to limit both.