I know I may not look like it, but I’ve been around a while. When you get to be my age, certain things become clearer than ever. I know the American story. ... My lifetime has taught me to embrace freedom and democracy, a future based on core values that have defined America — honesty, decency, dignity, and equality — ; to respect everyone; to give everyone a fair shot; to give hate no safe harbor.
- President Joe Biden, 2024 State of the Union
This week's featured post is "Biden Met the Challenge".
This week everybody was talking about the State of the Union
They were also talking about Katie Britt's disastrous Republican response. The featured post covers both.
and Super Tuesday
As expected, Trump locked up the Republican nomination and Nikki Haley withdrew. She didn't immediately endorse Trump, but I have to believe that's coming. She sees what he is, but she's going to bend the knee to him anyway.
On the Democratic side, Biden was not seriously challenged. In fact, Biden has done quite well in the primaries: His vote totals compare favorably with the percentages Obama got when he ran for reelection in 2012.
So here we are: a Biden/Trump rematch in the fall. It's time for everybody to stop fantasizing that they'll get some other choice and decide whether they want a democratic future or a fascist one.
Jay Kuo points out an aspect of Super Tuesday that hasn't gotten much coverage: Polls appear to have a pro-Trump bias. Kuo means "bias" in the statistical sense, not the conspiracy-theory sense. In every state but North Carolina, Trump's margin of victory was smaller than the polls predicted. Kuo doesn't accuse pollsters of trying to promote Trump, but apparently something in their technique makes them more likely to include Trump voters in their samples. Kuo links to University of Michigan Professor Justin Wolfers:
By my count Trump's actual margin in the primaries has underperformed that predicted by the polls by: 0-5%: AL, IA, TX
6-10%: CA, ME, NH, SC
10-15%: MA, MI, OK, TN, UT
16-20%: -
20% or more: MN, VA, VT (an astonishing 34%)
In Vermont, Trump was supposed to win by 30%, and instead he lost. Kuo draws the obvious conclusion:
If the national polls are overestimating Trump’s strength at anywhere near the levels that the primary polls did, then Biden would be leading Trump in all of them.
Super Tuesday also included downballot candidates. North Carolina nominated right-wing crank Mark Robinson for governor, giving Democrats a serious chance to hang onto that office as Governor Roy Cooper term-limits out.
In another widely watched race, Democrat Adam Schiff and Republican Steve Garvey (the baseball player) advanced to the November election for Senate in California.
and the NYT
For weeks I've been harping on the NYT's coverage of Biden: Whatever he says or does, the story is about his age, and no good news about Biden can be presented without "balancing" it with negative possibilities. Biden regularly gets a higher percentage of primary votes than Trump does, but Trump is portrayed as romping to victory while Biden's results are ominous.
Well, this week the chorus of NYT-critical voices swelled. Salon columnist Lucian Truscott wrote "There's something wrong at The New York Times".
I don’t want to bring up but her emails, but for crying out loud, why is the New York Times so clearly making the same mistakes of bias and emphasis they made in 2016 covering Hillary Clinton all over again? ...
There are no scandals with the name Biden attached to them, unless you consider the lies Russian spies supplied the so-called impeachment committee with. So The New York Times has apparently devoted half a floor in its Eighth Avenue headquarters to a search for bad news about Biden, and then they reserve a space nearly every day above the fold on the front page for whatever grain of grim shit the Biden hunters have managed to come up with. They’re probably working on a story on how Biden is losing the pro-choice vote as we speak, while pointing out the wild success of Trump’s “move to the middle” on abortion with “centrist” voters.
Dan Froomkin critiqued an interview with NYT's publisher, and "translated" the underlying message to the NYT's reporters and editors:
One: You will earn my displeasure if you warn people too forcefully about the possible end to democracy at the hands of a deranged insurrectionist.
And two: You prove your value to me by trolling our liberal readers.
That explains a lot of the Times’s aberrant behavior, doesn’t it?
And you can always count on Andy Borowitz to get to the heart of the issue:
POLL: A majority of Americans now believe that The New York Times, which was founded 172 years ago, is too old to be an effective newspaper.
and you also might be interested in ...
It looks like a government shutdown has been kicked down the road for another few weeks.
After pleading to the judge that the bond he needed to post was too high, Trump posted the $91 million on Friday, secured by an insurance subsidiary of the Chubb Group. Chubb chairman Evan Greenberg had been on an advisory committee during Trump's administration. The bond was required in order for him to proceed to appeal the verdict.
Now he needs to come up with $454 million by March 25 to appeal his civil fraud case.
Where exactly Trump gets this money should be a political issue, because we probably won't know where it came from or what promises Trump made to get it. I suspect, though, that these questions won't get the attention they deserve.
Last week I talked about the Nazi tactic of dehumanizing a group by treating their crimes as special, and in particular, how that tactic is being used against undocumented immigrants by presenting the Laken Riley murder as something uniquely horrible.
Gary Andover makes that point more sharply than I did:
Republicans are very concerned about one woman who was killed by a migrant. If she had been killed in a mass shooting by an American citizen with an AR-15 they wouldn't give a shit. Their response would be to loosen up gun laws even more.
And Fred Guttenberg, father of Jaime Guttenberg who was murdered in the Parkland school shooting, makes it personal:
To all MAGAT's using Laken Riley, where were you when my daughter was killed by a teenage American male? Where were you when Trump lied about the Parkland murder? You don't give two f-cks about Laken or her parents, just as you don't about victims of gun violence by Americans.
I'll tell you exactly where Marjorie Taylor Greene has been: Here's a video of her harassing Parkland survivor David Hogg with false accusations.
A couple insightful articles about anti-Semitism. Franklin Foer says "The golden age of American Jews is ending", and Daniel Drezner responds with "The State of American Jewish Anxiety".
Trump met with Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán at Mar-a-Lago Friday. In his remarks, Trump painted Orbán's government as something worth aspiring to here.
He’s a non-controversial figure because he says, "This is the way it’s going to be," and that’s the end of it. Right? He’s the boss.
One of the ways Orbán has achieved this lack of controversy is that his government and its political allies now own all the major news outlets, and he has stacked the judiciary so that it's useless to take him to court. He has reorganized the legislature into gerrymandered districts that his party can easily control with a minority of voter support.
Orbán is a hero to American conservatives. He has spoken at the CPAC conference here and held CPAC conferences in Budapest. Tucker Carlson has described Hungary as a "signpost to a better way".
and let's close with something hollow
I am filled with curiosity about Wilson's new airless basketball, which is 3D-printed and designed to have the exact weight and bounce of an NBA ball. Unfortunately, the prototype currently goes for around $2500, so I think I won't get my hands on one for a long time.
But Marques Brownlee did get to play with one, and here's what he reports.
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