Politics

The case for Democratic optimism Maybe everything is going to be fine. Or, at least, not a total disaster. These are the optimistic thoughts that some Democrats are all of a sudden allowing themselves to think. Two recent developments have helped fuel this unexpectedly upbeat mood in a party that has sometimes seemed resigned to midterm wipeout. First, there was Tuesday’s pro-choice victory in deep-red Kansas that has triggered bullishness on the galvanizing, turnout-boosting power of Dobbs. Second, Kyrsten Sinema and Chuck Schumer reached a deal that means the Arizona senator will sign up to a modified version of the reconciliation bill that Joe Manchin unexpectedly gave the green light to last week.

Jon Stewart has been a pretty busy guy lately. Not only is he hosting a new show-cum-podcast, The Problem with Jon Stewart, but he’s also been spending a good chunk of time in Cockburn’s hometown, Washington DC. Stewart has been making the waves while campaigning for HR. 3967, otherwise known as the Honoring our PACT Act of 2022, as he bashed Ted Cruz for initially not supporting it. His on-the-ground activism in DC garnered media attention this week after he held a press conference with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Jon Tester. Stewart made a passionate plea that would make Matthew McConaughey proud. The TV host also found himself embroiled in a spat with conservative firebrands Jack Posobiec and Raheem Kassam.

Cockburn has witnessed a lot of legal screw-ups in his day (and has been apart of several himself!), but revelations in the Alex Jones defamation trial have taken it to a new level. In a surprise twist while Alex Jones was on the stand, it was revealed that Jones's attorneys had accidentally sent the entire contents of the Infowars chief's phone to the Sandy Hook parents' attorney. A startled Alex Jones seemed taken aback when emails he claimed didn't exist appeared on a screen in front of the court room, with the Sandy Hook attorney asking, "You know what perjury is?" https://twitter.com/acyn/status/1554875445253812225?

After all the pro-life enthusiasm following the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, it was immediately clear to anyone paying attention that the politics of abortion in America would be completely changed. We now have the first example of that in Kansas, where a well-funded pro-abortion effort was able to block an attempt to amend the state constitution to allow the legislature to regulate abortion. Even in a Republican-heavy electorate, the ballot measure failed by a margin of 63 percent to 37 percent as of press time — fueled in part by heavier than expected opposition from more socially moderate mail-in voters. For pro-lifers, their incrementalist strategy over much of the past fifty years focused on the courts.

Liberalism is dying, and the American right is ascendant. That’s the lesson of the last six or eight years of national politics. Barack Obama should have been the beginning of a generational renewal for the Democratic Party. Instead the Democrats have been prisoners of their past. They looked backward in 2016 and nominated Hillary Clinton. After she failed, they reached even further back to nominate Joe Biden, a man born during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. Biden is not simply old; he’s nostalgia personified. He’s a throwback to a time when Democrats were less radical, when the party of FDR and JFK, and even of Bill Clinton, could lay claim to being an everyman’s party.

Something is happening across the world right now, something that deserves more attention than it's getting. First, to the Netherlands, where farmers have been protesting, blockading roads with their tractors and staging enormous rallies. The demonstrations have been going on and off since 2019, when the Dutch legislature proposed a crackdown on nitrogen emissions. Nitrogen is heavily emitted by livestock and fertilizer, which means the regulations are hitting Dutch agriculture especially hard. But it wasn't until July that the protests garnered international attention. The Dutch government announced plans in compliance with a court order to cut nitrogen emissions by 50 percent.

Cockburn watched in awe from the cheap seats at the Congressional Baseball Game last night as the Republicans swept the Democrats 10 to nil — hopefully a forecast for the midterms. Clutching his $12 Michelob Ultra, Cockburn was on the edge of his seat all night. One of the feats of athletic prowess was Democrat Representative Linda Sanchez’s lead-off walk in the sixth inning. Walks, for non-baseball fans, require almost zero work on behalf of the batter. When she took her base, she decided to throw decorum out the window as she flipped off the Republican dugout. After her no-work walk, a pinch runner came to take her place. The congresswoman didn’t have to swing or to run — pure Democrat athleticism! https://twitter.