Seriously, every pundit should be forced to watch this opening by Lawrence O’Donnell. Anyone with a sense of shame would never again declare that Biden should be swapped out for a fantasy candidate It’s done. STFU. Biden is the nominee. As he should be https://t.co/fjR7WoEo3z — Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) February 22, 2024 I believe it …
Excellent Links
Proud Democrat Open Thread: Madam Vice-President
This post is in: Biden Administration in Action, Excellent Links, Proud to Be A Democrat, Vice-President Harris
We make Black history every single day. Thank you to this incredible team serving our nation in the Biden-Harris Administration. pic.twitter.com/m4LZQUq1di — Vice President Kamala Harris (@VP) February 21, 2024 In Pittsburgh @VP made an unannounced visit to an active construction site where union workers are removing lead pipes. @VP thanked workers, highlighted the impact …
Proud Democrat Open Thread: Madam Vice-PresidentPost + Comments (147)
Regardless of what some white Democrats might think, Harris is both beloved and admired among the Democratic base — including among LGBTQ+ people — for her long history of support for historically marginalized people. For 20 years, Harris has been fighting for LGBTQ+ rights. She was marrying lesbian and gay couples in San Francisco as District Attorney in 2004, before same sex-marriage was legal. She even reconnected with a gay male couple, Bradley Witherspoon and Raymond Cabone, whom she married on Feb.13, 2004, a day before Valentine’s Day…
Should Biden decide now to withdraw, which is extremely unlikely, he would endorse Harris. Voters would vote for Biden-Harris on the ballot and Harris would accrue his delegates — and the nomination. Who other than Dean Phillips would challenge her? The die is cast.
It’s nearly all white male pundits and late-night comedians (also all white men) doing this hand-wringing over Biden’s age. The Black Caucus is strongly supportive of Biden. It’s implausible that Gavin Newsom, Pete Buttigieg or Gretchen Whitmer would set themselves up as write-in candidates against Harris: even if they wanted to — that’s career suicide for any future candidacy in 2028 or 2032…
New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, who was close friends with Harris when they were in the Senate together, highlights Harris’s work on key issues of HBCU funding, police reform, expanding access to health care and LGBTQ rights. Booker told CNN, “I can’t think of a time that I’ve seen somebody have earned her chops but not get the credit where credit is due.”
Senate Pro Tempore Patty Murray was succinct, summing up the concern of many white pundits that Harris will be the next president — and expand the presidency beyond white men forever: “Everyone who says you can’t do something,” she said, “is afraid that you will.”
"America has demonstrated that they are ready, willing & able to support candidates who are experienced, who are qualified, & who have the interest of the American people at heart. And that has been VP Harris at every turn."@Senlaphonza reacts to Nikki Haley's attack on Harris pic.twitter.com/UED6oJ3YIS
— Inside with Jen Psaki (@InsideWithPsaki) February 17, 2024
"If [Biden] had to pass the powers to you … Are you capable? Are you ready to step into the role?"
KAMALA HARRIS: "I am absolutely ready" pic.twitter.com/xOGrMD4OhW
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) February 21, 2024
Wednesday Morning Open Thread: Shut Up & Listen to President Biden Already
This post is in: 2024 Elections, Excellent Links, President Biden, Proud to Be A Democrat
74% of Americans view the war in Ukraine as important to US national interests 43% describe it as “very important” 59% of Americans describe the war in Ukraine as important to them personally when askedhttps://t.co/6k9MIs1tjU — mozy1995 (@PatriziaScally) February 19, 2024 Former Rep. @AdamKinzinger urges Republican House members to force Speaker Johnson to allow a …
Wednesday Morning Open Thread: Shut Up & Listen to President Biden AlreadyPost + Comments (232)
So you can understand why Biden’s team might similarly be waiting out this moment of consternation among his allies and other observers. The report on his possession of classified documents from special counsel Robert Hur triggered a new round of analysis about Biden’s age and how perceptions of his age would affect the general election and so on. There has been no shortage of musing about how, hey, maybe Biden could just step aside? Maybe the Democrats could just pretend that the past 10 months or so didn’t happen and start some truncated sort of delegate-assigning process right now with a new slate of candidates? Maybe this could be Trump-vs.-Someone-Else after all?
Prompting the expected response from Biden’s team: no real response at all. Yes, you get the inside-baseball stories about how the State of the Union address will be a reset, but there’s no sign Biden won’t be the Democrat on the ballot in November. Just like Biden kept his head down until the South Carolina primary in 2020 and so on.
This is not as wildly deluded an approach as some seem to think.
First of all, the race remains close. Yes, four years ago, Biden consistently led in national polling at this point and, yes, Democrats needed to win the national vote by a healthy margin to keep the electoral college close in 2016 and 2020. That’s all true. But it is not the case that Biden is obviously losing any of the states he won in 2020. In part, this is because there aren’t a lot of polls yet and, in part, this is because polling this far out isn’t that useful…
Polls aren’t designed to predict the results of a contest nine months in the future. They’re not even designed to predict the results of a close contest the next day. People are often far too willing to assume that a poll showing a candidate up by two points was “wrong” if the candidate loses by one point — as though the pollsters didn’t tell people about the margin of error.
Let’s assume, though, that recent polling showing Trump up a point or two nationally is broken-clock-twice-a-day-style exactly predictive of where the race would be in November if nothing else changed. The thing about that is … things will change!
The race isn’t actually set. That’s not to say that Nikki Haley will be the Republican nominee instead of Trump; despite the Haley campaign’s insistence that she might be — and some of the media’s willingness to entertain that idea for the sake of keeping people interested — it will take something other than standard campaign machinations for that to occur. Instead, saying the race isn’t set means that Americans aren’t tuned into the idea that Trump and Biden will once again be facing off in November and/or aren’t paying attention to the race just yet. Democrats’ negative views of Trump have softened in recent months. Will that still be the case after five months of relentless campaign ads?
What’s more, voters’ decisions are historically influenced by things that, in 2024, haven’t yet happened. Research presented in 2012 showed that the presidential popular vote margin was influenced most heavily by income growth in the second quarter of the election year — that is, the quarter that won’t begin until April 1…
Bedtime Reading for the Young & Simple: An American Education: Notes from UATX
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Excellent Links, Glibertarianism, Grifters Gonna Grift
this is transcendent honestly https://t.co/UdhCDRAMDQ pic.twitter.com/ZYu3KE9iT6 — katie (@focusfronting) February 19, 2024 There are WOKE DRAGONS under the bed, but our WHITE KNIGHTS will vanquish them for you (and a moderate fee)… Remember Bari Weis and her proudly, avowedly University of Austin? Noah Rawlings, at The New Inquiry, goes “Inside the “Forbidden Courses” at the …
Crow is a savvy investor, from a family of savvy investors. (His father, Trammell Crow, was thought to be the largest private landlord in the US.) He invests not only in real estate but ideology. He’s donated to the conservative magazine The National Review, conservative thinktank The Witherspoon Institute, and at least two powerful libertarian organizations started with funds from Charles Koch—The Institute For Justice and The Cato Institute. If Crow is putting money behind UATX, it can be inferred that he believes the school will promote the same values as other recipients of his patronage—privatizing social services, lambasting attempts to increase sexual and racial diversity in education and the workplace—and will lead to the same effect—maintaining power in the hands of wealthy white men…
The students’ demographics were as revealing as their chosen majors. Roughly 80% were white. Over 70% were men. There was not a black man in the room. The way these percentages diverge from national higher education averages should tell you something about what kind of intellectual community UATX is building. In practice, UATX is recruiting a student body whose racial and gender makeup resembles a pre-civil rights university.
Pano Kanelos, president, stood up. It was time for the opening remarks. Our chatter lulled, and he began to speak in gentle, benevolent tones. He told us that we weren’t starting a university; we were a university. This is what a university looks like: people coming together for conversations, much like the ones we’d been having over our complimentary chicken dinners. “Dia-logue,” he said. “From the Greek, logos.” Two rational beings, engaged in rational discourse. He smiled. We smiled. And with little further ado, he introduced Peter, whom the other students had not yet had the good fortune of meeting. Peter, Pano told us, was “kicking butt in the righteous name of freedom.”
Peter springs to the center of the room. The air pressure changes. A buzz, a hum, a current about us. He brims with a frenzied energy. Something is happening. He is going to give us a taste of what’s to come, he says. This is the kind of intellectual activity we’re going to experience at UATX. We’re going to grapple with big issues. We’re going to be daring, fearless, undaunted. We’re going, he says, to do something called “Street Epistemology.”
What is Street Epistemology? He’ll demonstrate. It’s one of two things he does, the other being jiu-jitsu. “I don’t have a life,” he says. “I talk to strangers and I wrestle strangers.” But before we can do Street Epistemology, Peter needs to think of some questions…
… I speak of the school’s true target audience, of the young neoconservatives who seemed to think trans athletes and immigrants were the greatest threat to the Union, whose high school tuition had cost 4x a degree from a public university, who nodded at UATX speakers with graduate degrees from Berkeley or UChicago as they railed against “elites” and “elite culture” on the office complex of a billionaire. At lunch or between class sessions, you could hear them say interesting things. Consider the remarks of a single afternoon. One student, bravely reviving the pseudoscience of physiognomy, said that if your index finger was longer than your ring finger, that probably meant you were gay. Someone else claimed that 20% of Gen Z identified as LGTBQ. “There’s no way a society can evolve if 20% of its population is gay,” another student added, shaking his head. “Evolve,” in this case, seemed to mean “stay the same” or “turn back the historical clock.” Later, yet another statistic was cited: “7% of France is Muslim.” “Yeah,” a peer replied, “that’s a problem because they don’t want to integrate.”
The subtext of these remarks was simple. The social capital, political influence, and access to wealth that was formerly the uncontested and exclusive prerogative of straight white men was now under question. They felt it at school. They saw it in the media. They were here, at UATX, to live out a dying dream, to vent their frustration at its loss, and to help one another cling to it as long as possible. They recommended internships in finance and tech to each other. They recommended books. “Have you read The Strange Death of Europe?” one student asked, referring to Douglas Murray’s 2017 political text which propagates the ethnonationalist Great Replacement Theory. “That’s a great book,” he heard in reply.
THE guest speakers and founders of UATX were the ideal figures to strengthen these students’ ideas—or to indoctrinate the unconverted. Each evening after class we would congregate in the Debate Chamber of Old Parkland to heed them…
First up: Kevin D. Williamson, Writer in Residence at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, wearing a salt and pepper beard, a pink shirt, a blue tie. He riffed on the topic of journalism for 30 minutes. He enjoined us to read the bible and to “get yourself an 8th-grade grammar book” instead of a journalism degree. He suggested, usefully, that we “learn something about something.” He threw in a few zingers. For instance, The Washington Post published “boring, dry, sterile” articles. And Bernie Sanders was not “as crazy as he seems,” he was actually “a lot crazier than he seems.” Williamson shared some inspiring historical factoids, like, “the people who wrote our constitution, these people didn’t have law degrees,” forgetting the 32 framers who were lawyers. (Ralph, back in the hotel room that same night, would ruefully describe the whole thing as “a little too irreverent.”) Harlan Crow was in the audience with us that evening, wearing a pink quarter-zip sweater and a red face, chuckling at Williamson’s tedious jokes. At the end of the talk, when some students became aware of Crow’s presence, the excitement in the room was palpable. He embodied, after all, peak success…
On the third day, we heard from Richard Hanania, who is the author of the book The Origins of Woke—blurbed by billionaire Peter Thiel as showing that “we need … government violence to exorcise the diversity demon.” Hanania is also the author of blatantly white supremacist articles, as HuffPost reported not long after I attended UATX. Writing under the pseudonym “Richard Hoste” in the early 2010s, Hanania advocated ethnic cleansing and forced sterilizations based on IQ tests. When HuffPost disclosed this at the beginning of August, Hanania claimed that his views had since changed—as would any neo-Nazi who cares about his upcoming book’s sales. The thing is, recent writing under Hanania’s own name is no less fascistic. He is the author of tweets supporting eugenics and calling for “more policing, incarceration, and surveillance of black people.” …
DESPITE UATX’s claims of ideological uniformity in higher ed, the regressive social politics found at the school are not much different from those you might hear as students trickle out of a data structures or financial investments class at a major university. But UATX is a “genuinely safe space,” as Weiss put it, in the sense that it isolates students from the inconvenient opposition of other peers and professors. It is a monoculture of free-market faith which provides, in the end, a venue for young people seeking success in tech and finance to network and to fortify the rightwing ideas that brought them here in the first place. On November 8, UATX announced that it had received certification from the State of Texas and would welcome its first graduating class in the fall of 2024. This month it hosted a prospective student’s weekend. While the university still lacks national accreditation, which typically takes at least five years to obtain, it is now able to grant degrees. But will the university actually get off the ground? Can its rightwing summer camp actually evolve into a four-year degree? UATX is more viable than you may think. The university’s 2021 tax returns declared over $10 million in assets. This fall, Pano Kanelos stated that UATX had raised around $200 million, or 80% of the school’s $250 million fundraising goal. That number is significantly larger than the endowment of comparably small schools, like Antioch College ($49.5 million), American Baptist College, ($11.2 million), and Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts ($4.6 million)…
If anything is novel about UATX’s model, it is the creation of a rightwing monoculture in the form of a university, rather than a thinktank or policy institute. The university model carries certain advantages. Major investment firms and tech companies have long aimed recruiting efforts at select schools based on reputation and social connections. UATX could present rightwing business leaders with a new, particularly convenient recruitment scenario: they would know in advance the political commitments of the student body, making it that much easier to maintain a conservative culture within their companies. While blatantly reactionary universities do already exist, they tend to be religious or obscure or both. UATX replaces religion with a gospel of technocapitalism. It wards off obscurity by inviting noisy online extremists, like Hanania, and courting the favor of high-profile rich men, like Lonsdale, Andreessen, and Crow…
By all means, read the whole thing, for a panorama of unintentional humor among the ‘intellectuals’. I am, for some reason, convinced that Harlan Crow’s grandkids are not liable to enroll in the University of Theoretically-Austin; this seems like a holding pen for the next generation of Vivek Ramaswamys and Richard Hananias, aspiring (confused) wanna-bes hoping the grift will last long enough for them to score a ‘leadership potential’ position where they can aspire to attract a sugar daddy of their very own.
While our site is still down from all the traffic, use this: https://t.co/glaTgNP28R
— The New Inquiry (@newinquiry) February 20, 2024
Foreign Affairs Open Thread: Concerning the Death of Alexei Navalny
This post is in: Excellent Links, Foreign Affairs, RIP
“Listen, I’ve got something very obvious to tell you. You’re not allowed to give up. If they decide to kill me, it means that we are incredibly strong.” – Alexei Navalny My deepest condolences to Alexei Navalny’s family and friends, to his staff, and to the people of Russia. — Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) February 16, …
Foreign Affairs Open Thread: Concerning the Death of Alexei NavalnyPost + Comments (106)
On the plane to Moscow in 2021, He knew there was no way back – Navalny wanted to set an example to show that one can sacrifice so much for his fellows and beliefs.
His courage inspired generations of human rights defenders around the world. My heart is with his family. pic.twitter.com/c3MbCMNYDW— Nathan Law ??? (@nathanlawkc) February 16, 2024
Mr. Pierce, at Esquire — “There Was No One Braver Than Alexei Navalny”:
… There was no braver person alive than Navalny, who went back to Russia when he already was the embodiment of resistance to the current regime, which already had tried to kill him once. He was never going to be a Mandela, or a Havel, or a Walesa because he never was going to get out of his Arctic prison alive. Even if he somehow served his full sentence, which was a real long shot even without outside interference, he would’ve been over 70 upon release. Now he has to be a symbol, and he will be a damned good one. Even Republican U.S. Senators like Thom Tillis of North Carolina have noticed.
“Navalny laid down his life fighting for the freedom of the country he loved. Putin is a murderous, paranoid dictator. History will not be kind to those in America who make apologies for Putin and praise Russian autocracy. Nor will history be kind to America’s leaders who stay silent because they fear backlash from online pundits.”
This country invented the architecture in which political courage can be nurtured and encouraged, and yet it seems in criminally short supply these days. Meanwhile, somehow, it lives again in the wilderness at the top of the world.
Navalny is dead and Ukraine is running out of bullets.
Buying the Republican Party has proven to be Putin’s best investment.
— Rachel Bitecofer ???????? (@RachelBitecofer) February 16, 2024
As Muscovites lay flowers in memory of Alexei Navalny riot police moved in. A woman shouted: "We have the right to stand here & we will!" Another cried: "This street isn't yours. It belongs to everyone!" Our latest report from Moscow. Thanks @AntonChicherov @BenTavener #Navalny pic.twitter.com/AAfrx1jNEO
— Steve Rosenberg (@BBCSteveR) February 17, 2024
People ask me how Russians are feeling. Here's my answer: this is what happened to a young woman who tried to put flowers at a makeshift memorial for Navalny. Russians either support Putin and those who don't are scared to say anything. Because this is what happens. https://t.co/p6RZxXi5wg
— Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) February 17, 2024
.@PuckNews’ @juliaioffe joins @TrevorLAult to discuss the reported death of Alexei Navalny, longtime Russian opposition politician and critic of Putin: “With his death, there’s a sense that the back of the opposition has been completely broken.” https://t.co/ATgwbkUGuH pic.twitter.com/giIuAsuDAb
— ABC News Live (@ABCNewsLive) February 17, 2024
And if nobody does anything? He is totally free to do what he wants. He can kill anyone, anywhere, at any time, as many as he wants, for any reason.
I wonder if people both in Russia and abroad realize what is about to happen.— Slava Malamud ???????? (@SlavaMalamud) February 16, 2024
“no room,” in the sense there are now so many Putin apologists in the GOP, it’s nearly impossible to accommodate more? https://t.co/VRNyMeQi5I
— Robert X George (@RobGeorge) February 16, 2024
.@SpeakerJohnson no one has more power than you to do something concrete to respond to the horrific murder of Navalny. End your vacation and pass the new aid to Ukraine bill. I know that’s what’s Alexey would want you to do. https://t.co/ZO5TliwZf2
— Michael McFaul (@McFaul) February 16, 2024
Protests, poisoning and prison: The life and death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny https://t.co/Vw5TWmUPy9
— The Associated Press (@AP) February 16, 2024
What an interesting and heartbreaking range of views expressed here. https://t.co/bPLbeamUpe
— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec) February 17, 2024
Yes, an investigation. I wonder if we could get M. Hercule Poirot to unravel this mystery. It won’t be easy, I bet. https://t.co/Eule8VwvM1
— Slava Malamud ???????? (@SlavaMalamud) February 16, 2024
Now they're hiding Navalny's corpse. https://t.co/vEpQ9OeTct
— Michael Weiss (@michaeldweiss) February 17, 2024
In Russia’s Arctic, Alexei Navalny’s mother searches for her son’s body https://t.co/WTWIsjSlnb
— The Associated Press (@AP) February 17, 2024
Putin murders Navalny the same week Donald Trump invites Russia to invade Europe and MAGA Mike Johnson blocks aid to Ukraine. This isn’t a coincidence, it’s the green light Putin has been given. https://t.co/K0Tm3H4IxE
— Rep. Eric Swalwell (@RepSwalwell) February 16, 2024
*Very* Chill Grey Pre-Dawn Open Thread: John Oliver Makes ‘Justice’ Thomas An Offer
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Excellent Links, Open Threads, Republican Venality, Supreme Court Corruption
Holy shit John Oliver was on fire tonight 🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/i447dbUeY6 — André (@AndreSegers) February 19, 2024 Per Deadline, “John Oliver Returns To HBO & Offers To Pay Clarence Thomas $1M A Year To “Get The F*** Off The Supreme Court””: … On the Season 11 premiere of the late-night talk show, Oliver discussed the U.S. …
John Oliver on the fact Clarence Thomas took 38 luxury trips from rich friends and didn’t disclose them: “A pretty good rule of thumb is if it can be a prize on The Price Is Right, it’s not personal hospitality.” #LastWeekTonight pic.twitter.com/MXu6txSXyp
— Garin Pirnia (@gpirnia) February 19, 2024
John Oliver offered Justice Clarence Thomas $1 Million a year and a $2.4 million motor-coach to stepdown from the Supreme Court. I mean it sounds like a mockery, but no more than Thomas already mocks judicial decorum, impartiality & legitimacy.@LastWeekTonight @iamjohnoliver pic.twitter.com/kokDtQ7GYr
— Doug Winfield 🪩 (@d2k) February 19, 2024
This is *not* a good video (I’ll replace it when Last Week Tonight posts it properly), but the Clarence Thomas segment starts at the 12.30min mark, and The Offer at the 30min mark:
Timeline Cleanser: Jason Kander Is A Mensch
This post is in: Excellent Links, Foreign Affairs, Immigration, War
Mr. Charles P. Pierce’s latest by-subscription weekend post at Esquire — “The Finest Kind of Politician”: … In 2016, Kander made his big move, taking on incumbent U.S. Senator Roy Blunt. It was a noisy, expensive campaign in a freakish political year. (How freakish? We elected an authoritarian madman to be president that year.) Neither …
Timeline Cleanser: Jason Kander Is A MenschPost + Comments (26)
Through his Uncle Salam, Rahim Rauffi got in touch with Jason Kander. Neither one of them had the faintest idea what to do, but they knew they had to do something. Kander felt responsible for the family’s peril because it was Salam Rauffi’s work as a translator for him that put them on those lists. Thus was launched Operation Bella, named for Kander’s young daughter. Thus was launched a project of covert intrigue that would have done credit to John Le Carré.
Kander started a GoFundMe site to raise money to help trapped Afghans, with Jewish Vocational Service agreeing to handle the incoming funds. Back in 1989, it was Jewish Vocational Service that had helped relocate the family of Kander’s wife as Jewish refugees from Soviet Ukraine. Diana, whose maiden name was Kagan, was 8 then, arriving with her family and grandmother, also named Bella. Hundreds of thousands of dollars poured in from across the country. The operation, in the end, would cost nearly $3 million. Unbeknownst to Rauffi, the secret plan to rescue his family quickly grew to a plan to rescue not just one, but two, then 10, then 20, then ultimately 75 families — or as Kander called them “383 souls.” To pull it off, Kander and colleagues had to make sure that none of the families knew of one another. “We couldn’t tell them,” Kander said, “because if one got captured, the whole thing could be lost.”
Nothing was flying out of Kabul, so Operation Bella developed an escape plan that centered in Mazar-e-Sharif. It took 15 perilous hours to move the families from Kabul to Mazar-e-Sharif on a road on which people were being shot at Taliban roadblocks. Once there, the families were shuffled between locations until, finally, Kander called Rahim with the plan…
After two days hunkered down in the ballroom — at one point, Taliban soldiers raided an actual wedding down the hall — the 383 “guests” made it to a darkened Airbus at the airport. They got safely away to Georgia, and thence to Albania. From there, a number of them flew to St. Louis. But Rahim Rauffi and his family came to Kansas City. Kansas City, here they came, because Jason Kander, International Wedding Planner, lived there.
“I have a lot of interest in telling this story,” Kander said. “One of my purposes hasn’t changed. I want — as there’s going to be all these Afghan Americans here now — I want Americans to understand that every Afghan American they meet did something heroic to get here. They may meet them — they may be their waiter or someone else — but they’re one of the greatest heroes they’ve ever met.”
Jason Kander may never run for office again, but if Aristotle was right, and the highest form of community is the polis, the people, then Jason Kander will be one of the highest forms of politician you ever will meet.
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