Politics

The Walt Disney Company is going to need some special magic following two losses in the Florida state legislature. Florida's House and Senate passed laws this week ending Disney’s self-governing special district and closing an exemption in the current social media law for companies that own theme parks. Governor Ron DeSantis is expected to sign the legislation. It’s a quick governmental haymaker to Disney’s big-eared visage and a surprising one. The Friends of Ron DeSantis political action committee has accepted almost $107,000 from Disney Worldwide Services, according to records. Disney regularly hands out money to both Republicans and Democrats.

Obama sets his sights on ‘disinformation’ When Obama was elected president in 2008, his campaign’s innovative use of social media to organize and fundraise was seen as central to his success. In 2012, Obama’s successful re-election campaign was heralded as an even more sophisticated technological triumph. Dozens of fawning profiles of the campaign team praised the genius deployment of “big data” and “microtargeting” to deliver victory. Fast forward a decade and the first internet president has decided to make online disinformation the subject of a series of public appearances.

Will Joe Biden be feeling the Bern in 2024? According to a memo leaked to the Washington Post, private-jet-flying socialist Bernie Sanders has not “ruled out” the possibility of throwing his red beret into the ring for a third time. The memo, written by Sanders’s advisor and 2020 campaign manager Faiz Shakir, read: “In the event of an open 2024 Democratic presidential primary, Senator Sanders has not ruled out another run for president, so we advise that you answer any questions about 2024 with that in mind.” The timing of this memo is interesting. Just days before the leak, the Hill reported that President Joe Biden had told former president Barack Obama that he is “planning to run for reelection in 2024.

Elizabeth Warren’s magical thinking In an article for the New York Times, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren claims to have the answers to her party’s woes. There are good reasons to be suspicious of Warren’s plan. Not least Warren’s own political performance in recent years. Despite plenty of very flattering media coverage, she lost every primary or caucus she took part in during the Democratic presidential primary. She somehow managed to finish third in her home state of Massachusetts. But leaving Warren’s track record to one side, the biggest tell in her plan to save the Democrats is the absence of any kind of trade offs and the failure to grapple with any kind of inconvenient truths or uncomfortable facts.

In the four decades since the founding of the Federalist Society in 1982, the conservative legal movement has made great strides in recasting the federal and state judiciaries in its image. The Society is enormously popular on leading law-school campuses and has sent many of its leading lights into the federal judiciary. Numerous sitting Republican senators, some of them former Supreme Court clerks, came up through the Society’s ranks. Perhaps most remarkable, given the Society’s humble origins, five justices, the majority of the sitting Supreme Court, would identify as some sort of constitutional “originalist.

Cockburn has long regarded the Easter bunny as the least convincing of all the holiday-themed characters. Give him jelly beans, malt eggs, even a couple verses from “All Creatures of Our God and King” — but leave the giant rabbits out of it, says he. That’s why he was so alarmed by video that emerged from the president’s annual Easter egg roll on Monday. The footage shows Biden chatting with a reporter who asks him a question about Afghanistan. He’s just beginning to answer when suddenly the White House’s resident Easter bunny lunges between him and the press. The creature turns to Biden and waves, while the leader of the free world turns obediently and walks away. Far be it from Cockburn to deny that the rotund rabbit had a point.

The year of totalitarian failure Perhaps the great theme of the first quarter of 2022 is the way in which the West’s main adversaries have come crashing down to earth. In Ukraine, Russia’s army has been revealed to be something of a paper tiger. Before the invasion, it was assumed by both the Kremlin and Western officials that Ukraine was there for the taking, and that a successful invasion could not be stopped. Events have proven otherwise. That doesn’t mean an angry, nuclear-armed and callous Vladimir Putin isn’t dangerous, but the Russian threat has been found to be in many ways less worrying than many thought it was before February.

In his novel The Prime Minister, the fifth in the Palliser series, Anthony Trollope has Plantagenet Palliser, the Duke of Omnium, enunciate his political credo. The Duke explains to Phineas Finn, who recently defended him in the House of Commons from the charge that he tried to purchase a seat for one of his supporters, that the belief that “political virtue is all on one side is both mischievous and absurd. We allow ourselves to talk in that way because indignation, scorn, and sometimes, I fear, vituperation, are the fuel with which the necessary heat of debate is maintained.” Finn responds, “There are some men who are very fond of poking the fire.” Just so.

In February 2021 the FBI indicted L. Brent Bozell IV for crimes committed during the Capitol riot. The significance of Bozell’s presence in the rabble that broke into the Senate chamber was not lost on the media. “Mr. Bozell’s father is a high-profile right-wing activist known for infusing his politics with Christian values,” the New York Times mentioned in its write-up of the arrest. And Bozell’s grandfather, L. Brent Bozell Jr., had been William F. Buckley Jr.’s debate partner, Joseph McCarthy’s and Barry Goldwater’s ghostwriter, the founder of Triumph and organizer of the first anti-abortion protest in the United States. Liberal critics traced the arc of the American right from Bozell Jr.