Make America great again.
- Donald Trump
We are not going back.
- Kamala Harris
This week's featured posts are "The Harris Surge" and "Couches, cat ladies, and J. D. Vance".
This week everybody was talking about the Harris surge
That's the subject of one featured post. Here's something I left out of that piece: Fox News' Brian Kilmeade criticizing Kamala for speaking to 6,000 members of the historically Black Zeta Phi Beta Sorority rather than attending Netanyahu's speech to Congress.
She'd rather address, in the summer, a sorority -- a colored sorority. Like she can't get out of that.
This segment of Nicole Wallace's show demonstrates what Harris candidacy means to Black people and especially Black women. Erin Haines describes Republican's racist attacks on Harris as "a train that is never late".
The segment replays part of a Harris interview:
So here's the thing about breaking barriers. Breaking barriers does not mean that you start on one side of the barrier, and you end up on the other side. There's a breaking involved. And when you break things you get cut. And you may bleed. And it is worth it every time.
Maya Wiley responds:
We have been cut. When she says that ... we have lived that cut as students at Ivy League schools. We lived that cut when we were lawyers standing in front of a judge that said "Where's the lawyer?"
And she calls out the sense of "victimization" Trump keeps appealing to:
People who are victimized by fairness. Who are victimized by competition from the competent. And who are upset because they have for so long gotten to be mediocre and rise.
The whole thing is worth watching.
and J. D. Vance
the subject of the other featured post. And I didn't even get around to mentioning this weird conversation he had on a podcast in 2021. He claimed "a core part of what's wrong with journalism in America" is that female reporters are panicking about their biological clocks running out. And then this:
they're all fundamentally atheist or agnostic. They have no real value system.
Because to him the only values are Christian values. If you don't have those values, you don't have any values.
and Trump's "You won't have to vote any more"
A mistake journalists and pundits often make with Trump is to hear what he says and think: "He couldn't possibly have meant that." Then they search for some less threatening interpretation, and claim that's what he must have really meant.
Well, this weekend I caught myself about to do the same thing. Friday, Trump spoke to Turning Point Action, a political group of right-wing "Christians" [About that: How much of the Sermon on the Mount would they reject as "woke"?] founded by Charlie Kirk. He said that Christians needed to get out and vote for him just this once.
You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.
That sure sounds like he's confessing to exactly what his enemies charge: If he gets another term, democracy will be over in America. Nobody will have to vote any more.
But then I thought: No, he must not have meant that. He must be talking to Christians who usually ignore politics, telling them that they should make an exception this time. (Even that isn't a very positive take: He's pitching his message to people who think democracy is a burden; they should vote for him so they can slough off the chore of self-government.)
But he said what he said. He should have to explain it, not me.
As he so often does, Pete Buttigieg had the perfect response when he talked to Jen Psaki yesterday: "I don't want to have to worry about what he means."
Marcy Wheeler traces how the NYT covered this speech: Its initial headline was about Trump calling Harris "a bum". Only after the won't-have-to-vote clip caught fire on social media did the NYT mention it -- in paragraph 14, with the explanation I suggested above.
As he so often does, Trump wants it both ways on his failed assassination: He wants to brag about "taking a bullet for democracy", but he doesn't want to provide any transparency about his injuries. (In recent appearances, his ear looks fine.)
Predictably, the NYT completely ignored the transparency issue and did its own analysis to back up Trump's claim about the bullet. The FBI later said more-or-less the same thing, though they left open whether he was hit by a whole bullet or just a fragment of one.
This is the result of Trump successfully working the refs: He has complained so loud for so long about "the fake news media" that the NYT is too intimidated to apply the standards every other politician is subject to.
Appallingly, the Times' editorial board then framed transparency as a both-sides issue, and called on Harris to make the first moves: "she needs to do more, and she needs to do it quickly".
Trump won't release the real ER report on his injury, so somebody made one up. It's fake, but I love it.
and Elon Musk
Elon had a bad week. On Tuesday, Tesla announced that its second-quarter earnings dropped 45% compared to last year. It was bad news in two ways: the number of cars sold was down 4.8%, and profit on each car dropped as well, as the company had to cut prices on some models. Tesla, which the market treats as a growth stock, saw its shares drop from around $250 to $225. Musk owns over 700 million shares, so his net worth went down nearly $18 billion. The shares still sell at over 60 times earnings (more than double the market average), so there's still a long way to fall if growth doesn't resume.
Tesla has a number of problems, starting with increased competition in the electric-vehicle market, and including the Cybertruck, which is looking like an Edsel-level blunder. The company's fantasy of self-driving robotaxis continues to recede into the future. But Musk himself has also become a drag on Tesla, as liberal electric-vehicle buyers are turned off by his increasingly fascist social-media presence.
Last month, Tesla shareholders approved a plan to grant Musk tens of billions of dollars worth of additional stock options, under the implied threat that he might take his future ideas elsewhere. If those ideas are anything like the Cybertruck, the company will be sorry it didn't let him go.
Musk's personal image took yet another hit this week, as his 20-year-old trans daughter responded publicly to comments he had made about her Monday in an interview on Jordan Peterson's podcast. Musk told Peterson that his "son" was "dead", "killed by the woke mind virus", and that Musk himself had been "tricked" into approving gender-affirming treatments.
Thursday, Musk's child, Vivian Jenna Wilson, gave an interview to NBC News.
I think he was under the assumption that I wasn’t going to say anything and I would just let this go unchallenged. Which I’m not going to do, because if you’re going to lie about me, like, blatantly to an audience of millions, I’m not just gonna let that slide.
Wilson, who had her name legally changed two years ago to disassociate herself from Musk, described him as "absent", "cruel", and "cold". Looking at what he said, it's hard to argue with her.
and you also might be interested in ...
Last Sunday was the hottest day ever recorded on Earth. That record lasted until Monday. 2024 has consistently broken temperature-on-this-date records, and now that we're getting into the hottest part of the year it's breaking all-time records.
"Librarians are my suspects ...". This is the world MAGA is building.
Jess Piper, who writes the blog "The View from Rural Missouri", which I have linked to in the past, got swatted on Tuesday. One of her posts had drawn the ire of Libs of TikTok, which Wikipedia defines as "a handle for various far-right and anti-LGBT social-media accounts operated by Chaya Raichik". A few days later (a correlation whose causality is impossible to prove), a deputy sheriff interrupted her gardening to inform her that the sheriff's office, and several other law enforcement entities in the area, had received an email. The local water department had gotten a letter.
The email claimed to be from a close family relation. The letter stated that the family member had murdered me and my husband the night before. It went on to state that they intended to shoot and kill anyone who came on the property.
Needless to say, Jess was fine, and so was everyone else in her household. The point of a hoax like this is to provoke police to come into the situation with guns blazing, and maybe kill the unsuspecting target or her loved ones. Failing at that, the person being swatted should be terrorized, maybe so terrorized that she'll stop doing, saying, or writing things that far-right or anti-LGBT people find offensive.
It might have worked, but for the fact that Jess really does live in rural Missouri, where local authorities know most of the long-term residents. So the deputy sheriff decided to drop in on his neighbor rather than call in a SWAT team.
It sounds like the terrorizing part of the plan didn't work either.
In the end, this is the time in which we live. The internet has allowed me to find a following with like-minded people. It’s allowed me to organize across the state and remind people that folks like me exist in rural spaces. A whole lot of us live here and it’s getting out. We are contesting more rural seats and this will lead to more Democratic wins in my state.
But, with the good comes the bad. I have folks threaten me on a regular basis and now it has escalated to a swatting. But, I can’t bend to fear and I can’t stop the momentum we are building. So, I move on. We move on.
We lock arms. We do this together. I could not organize without support.
BTW: I notice Jess made an appearance across the river in Quincy, Illinois, my home town. She reports that Democrats in rural areas and small towns are just as energized as they are everywhere else.
Watch these clips of Don Jr. interviewing Vance and see what you think about those drug use rumors.
I just noticed Betsy McCaughey showing up as a panelist on CNN. Betsy is the well-known liar who is most famous for starting the death-panels hoax against the Affordable Care Act. Shame, CNN.
and let's close with something big and loud
I can't say elephants share my musical taste, but they're clearly playing something.
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