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Welcome to Thunderdome. Kamala Harris’s selection of Tim “MSNBC Dad” Walz as her running mate came as a surprise to many in the Acela-corridor set who had expected her to pick the rising talent, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, a far more centrist choice in a critical swing state viewed by many members of the Democratic elite as the future of the party.
Missouri trims Bush Talk about Squad goals: another of the most progressive members of Congress lost her Democratic primary last night, as Cori Bush was beaten by Wesley Bell in the race for Missouri’s 1st district.Bush first won her seat after playing a prominent role in the Black Lives Matter movement in Ferguson and the post-George Floyd protests in St. Louis — with one local particularly pleased to see the back of her.“Bye bye Cori Bush,” tweeted Mark McCloskey, co-star of the infamous viral gun-toting photo with his wife Patricia, taken as they faced down the Bush-led protest outside their house. “You may have torn down my gate, but the people of St. Louis tore down your career. And I ‘spat on your name.
Hurricane Debby is barreling through Florida, America's economy is crashing, US troops were injured in Iraq Monday and conflict in the Middle East is on the brink of a dangerous escalation — sounds like the perfect time to ban the use of plastic cutlery, right?! Instead of addressing the multiple crises the nation is currently grappling with, the Biden administration decided it was time federal government workers stopped using plastic forks. The Biden administration announced it is launching a plan to "phase out" the "procurement of single-use plastics from food service operations, events and packaging by 2027, and from all federal operations by 2035," according to the White House.
Vice President Kamala Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, admitted this Saturday to cheating on his first wife following an explosive report that he once got their nanny pregnant. “During my first marriage, Kerstin and I went through some tough times on account of my actions. I took responsibility, and in the years since, we worked through things as a family and have come out stronger on the other side,” Emhoff said in a statement provided exclusively to CNN. The report indicates that more than a decade ago Second Gentleman Emhoff cheated on his then-wife with a blonde nanny, Najen Naylor, who taught at the Willows, a Californian private school attended by his two children.
Despite the sharp polarization of American politics, there is surprising agreement on what went wrong with capitalism. Whether the writer or politician is coming at this question from the left or right, the blame often falls on four decades of “small government” ideology and free market orthodoxy since Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Whether the flaw in question is slowing productivity growth, the rise of oligopolies, the export of jobs, or income and wealth inequality, its source is traced to excessive faith in the “magic of the market.” Capitalism’s flaws are “market failures.” The problem: this narrative is wrong on the facts.
You’ve got to hand it to President Biden — even in his diminished state he still has a few tricks up his sleeve. You might think that as our octogenarian commander-in-chief is dragged kicking and screaming from office, amid the ignominious fumes of family influence-peddling no less, the last things he would shine a spotlight on are judicial term limits and ethics rules. But in fact his latest attack on the Supreme Court is the next logical battle in a war Biden launched decades ago and which Vice President Harris now plans to fully embrace and run with. What is being peddled as judicial “reform” is in fact the left’s continued effort to seize the remaining branch of government that has slipped from its grasp.
An emotional scene unfolded at Joint Base Andrews last night, with the surprise return of a number of American hostages after a prisoner swap with Russia and Belarus. Among those returned were Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post columnist Vladimir Kara-Murza, Radio Free Europe correspondent Alsu Kurmasheva and former US Marine Paul Whelan. The returned hostages were greeted by their families, along with President Biden and Vice President Harris. Harris exchanged what are technically her first remarks with the press since becoming the presumptive nominee: “This is an extraordinary day and I’m very thankful for our president.
Welcome to Thunderdome. The essential divide between Republican insiders on how to attack Kamala Harris is stuck, swinging back and forth between the question of inauthentic climber or authentic leftist. Is she an untrustworthy chameleon who was against fracking before she was for it? Or is she a San Francisco Democrat elitist who was the furthest senator to the left? When the George W. Bush re-elect had to tangle with John Kerry, they went the unreliable flip-flopper route — something Chris LaCivita is very familiar with as the then-media advisor to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth — to great success.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been asked a question in such a horrible manner,” Donald Trump began at this afternoon’s National Association for Black Journalists annual convention in Chicago. ABC News’s Rachel Scott had asked why black voters should trust him in light of his prior attacks on black journalists. “First question, you don’t even say ‘hello, how are you?’” Trump continued. “Are you with ABC? Because I think they’re a fake news network, a terrible level.” Trump went on query his opponent Kamala Harris’s racial ethnicity when asked about her being a DEI hire. “I didn’t know she was black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn black. She was always of Indian heritage and she was only promoting Indian heritage.
President Biden unveiled his outline for changes to the Supreme Court, which includes term limits for justices and a new code of ethics. He also called for a constitutional amendment saying former presidents do not have immunity from any federal criminal indictments, trials, convictions or sentencing — a direct dig at the Court’s recent immunity ruling in Trump’s favor. The plan comes amid a series of landmark decisions by the Supreme Court that favored conservatives, such as the overturning of Chevron and rulings on abortion and affirmative action, that sparked Democrats to criticize the 6-3 conservative controlled-court for an alleged lack of impartiality.
The Secret Service’s worst week since John Hinckley Jr. failed to gun down President Ronald Reagan continued with some buggy problems just days after the organization’s embattled director announced plans to step down following bipartisan condemnation.Fresh off of failing to adequately protect President Donald Trump from a deranged gunman, the Secret Service failed to secure the Watergate Hotel where Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was staying and allowed a pro-Hamas organization to pour live maggots all over a room where he was alleged to be dining. “BON APPETIT!! MAGGOTS RELEASED ON THE CRIMINAL ZIONIST’S WAR TABLE!” the Palestinian Youth Movement posted on Instagram, along with a video of insects crawling all over the Watergate’s grounds.
Welcome to Thunderdome. Last night, something that a month ago was unthinkable happened: Joe Biden announced from the Oval Office that he would stand down as his party’s nominee and pass the torch to a new generation of Democrats in Kamala Harris. The speech was blatantly political with the normal Jon Meacham high-school civics elements instead of sounding the type of deeply personal notes that marked the better aspects of Biden’s career. It was delivered with a world-weary tone, the old man being put out to pasture by a party and their media allies who deliberately chose to knife him at his weakest moment, despite lauding his achievements as historic for the past several years.
Today Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu became the first world leader to address a joint session of Congress four times, surpassing the previous record jointly held by him and Winston Churchill. And the anti-Israel protesters, not unlike the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health, drastically inflated their numbers ahead of Wednesday’s proceedings. Despite concern that more than 10,000 anti-Israel protesters would descend on the nation’s capital, only a small group that carried Hamas flags and shut down multiple streets showed up. That’s not to say there was no drama, however. There was “absolute chaos” in the streets of the capital by the protesters who did show, with some activists pepper-sprayed and arrested by the Capitol Police.
Does anyone else feel like an entire year has happened in the last week? Last Monday, former president Donald Trump arrived at the Republican National Convention after being a quarter-of-an-inch away from assassination (and losing part of his ear in the process), Jack Smith’s classified documents case against Trump was thrown out by a federal judge, President Joe Biden caught Covid and, finally, yesterday Biden announced that he is not running for re-election and endorsed his vice president Kamala Harris to be the new nominee. Deep breath in, deep breath out. Today’s edition of the DC Diary includes multiple items that will hopefully help you feel more prepared for what may come next.
One of the advantages of not having been born yesterday is the ability to recognize certain trends of the news cycle when they come around again. Am I alone in thinking that every major American political manifesto since about 1848 has made a promise of reducing the taxation burden on its hardworking citizens, for example? Or that for Brits, like me, of a certain age (sixty-eight), our whole lives have been spent in the shadow of a stale and still unresolved debate about the nation’s place in Europe? More recently, I was struck by a sense of déjà vu all over again when comparing the final meltdown in Joe Biden’s White House to the events preceding Richard Nixon’s departure from office fifty years ago. The case for presidential history repeating itself isn’t hard to make.
The Republican National Committee’s memorable four-day convention came to an end in Milwaukee last night. With an unusual performance from Kid Rock, a shirt-ripping Hulk Hogan and dozens of Trump-humanizing speeches, the RNC managed to throw a party that drew some attention, some laughs and certainly some tears — from worried Democratic strategists and enamored Trump-fans alike.It was, as The Spectator’s James Heale put it, “the first convention in twenty years where polls suggest the Republicans are on course to win the White House, producing an air of expectation and excitement.
Welcome to Thunderdome. It is an incredible circumstance that we face today. Just a week ago, it seemed that Donald Trump was headed into the GOP convention with a degree of momentum, but also uncertainty as to his choice for the vice presidential slot and still some wavering Republicans who needed to be brought into his coalition. It seemed that Joe Biden, for as much as he had struggled through a series of meandering interviews and uneven public appearances, was going to survive the attempts to move on from his presidency on the Democratic ticket. And for all the unsteadiness of the race, most polling showed that Trump was only slightly ahead in swing states across the country, with a long ways to go until November.The past week has changed everything.
Human beings are animals that often operate by proxy. Here’s a familiar example from the world of — well, I was going to say “the law,” but what I have in mind is not the law but its perversion, so let’s say “the legal bureaucracy.” Everyone has heard the phrase “the process is the punishment.” It covers a multitude of sins. In its core signification, the phrase describes an increasingly common situation in which the machinery of the law is deployed to harass, enervate, stymie and otherwise hobble someone the regime does not like but whom, for the time being anyway, it chooses not to incarcerate. Sometimes it is easier to bankrupt and demoralize an opponent into submission.
"The whole thing is fucked.” That’s how one former blue-state GOP official describes the current turmoil facing state Republican parties. Numerous reports have laid bare the financial struggles, leadership turnover and abject chaos that have ensnared the GOP’s state parties. State parties in Arizona and Pennsylvania, unable to make rent, have sold off their headquarters. There are active battles for control of the party in Michigan and Colorado. Arizona also recently pushed out its chairman and in Georgia the party chair stepped down. Meanwhile, multiple former state-party officials are under indictment in cases related to January 6.
From the outset, it was inconceivable. The idea that Donald J. Trump, limousine liberal, famed for bankruptcies both financial and moral, would triumph within a Republican Party less than four years removed from nominating Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan struck nearly every analyst as absurd on its face. Sure, there was a faction of support. Sure, he appealed to the populist wing. Sure, his message on immigration was more in line with the party’s base than the Wall Street Journal editorial page. But to win, in this crowded field, over so many leading lights of conservatism with the carefully constructed résumés designed to equip them for the nomination, if not the presidency? Inconceivable. Of course, in 2016, he did it — and by now we all know how.