It was the labor movement that helped secure so much of what we take for granted today: the 40-hour work week, the minimum wage, family leave, health insurance, Social Security, Medicare, retirement plans. The cornerstones of middle-class security all bear the union label.
This week's featured posts are "Can Trump Steal Georgia?" and "A Week in Trump's Declining Spiral".
This week everybody was talking about Trump's downward spiral
As I explained in the Teaser, I didn't really set out to write two Trump articles this week. I planned the Georgia article, but then as the week went on, there was some new Trump outrage every single day. This summary was getting swamped with them, so I moved them all to their own article.
and the Harris interview
Wednesday night, CNN aired a much-ballyhooed interview (transcript, video parts 1, 2, 3) where Dana Bash asked questions and Kamala Harris and Tim Walz answered them. The Democratic ticket survived the interview without blundering, but overall the interview just underlined the point I was making two weeks ago: Mainstream political journalism is broken. Answering their stupid questions does nothing to serve the cause of democracy.
Bash spent the interview asking Harris and Walz to respond to baseless accusations Trump and Vance keep making. Basically, she was playing the role of the trouble-making gossips I knew in junior high. ("Do you know what Marcy is saying about you?") I find myself agreeing with Jeff Tiedrich (who elaborated in more colorful language than I'm going to use here):
“Tim Walz lied about IVF” is a right-wing talking point. “Kamala Harris isn’t really Black” is a right-wing talking point.
pestering Democratic candidates about right-wing talking points is not journalism. it’s being a Republican tool.
The exchange that sums up the interview is this one:
BASH: Speaking of Republicans, I want to ask you about your opponent, Donald Trump. ... He suggested that you happened to turn Black recently for political purposes, questioning a core part of your identity.
HARRIS: Yeah.
BASH: Any—
HARRIS: Same old, tired playbook. Next question, please. (LAUGH)
BASH: That’s it?
HARRIS: That’s it.
Bash may have been surprised by Harris' dismissal of her question, but did it deserve any lengthier answer? Like a junior-high gossip, wasn't Bash angling for Harris to insult Trump in some way she could then carry back to him? ("Kamala Harris says you're a racist. How do you respond to that?")
Even the questions that sounded substantive really weren't. For example, Bash started the interview with: "What would you do on Day 1?"
Day 1 is only interesting when there is a change in parties, because -- unless the new president wants to be a dictator, as Trump has said he does -- the only possible actions are executive orders that reverse the previous administration's orders. So Biden's Day 1 was significant because he
- rejoined the Paris Climate Accords
- reversed Trump's Muslim ban
- stopped construction on Trump's border wall
- reversed Trump's moves to disengage from the World Health Organization.
Harris doesn't have any similar night-and-day disagreements with Biden's orders. Everything she has been talking about -- restore the protections of Roe v Wade, safeguard voting rights, restore the child tax credit, build more affordable housing, subsidize first-time home buyers, shift some of the tax burden from the middle class to the very rich, pass the border bill Trump had his minions in Congress block, etc. -- requires the cooperation of Congress, which isn't going to get any of it done in one day.
Bash knows this, so why is she asking? To set up critical headlines, like Politico's "Harris Dodged Questions About Her Day One Plans". (Politico's article went on to describe the dramatic actions five presidents took on Day 1. All five, of course, replaced presidents from the opposite party.)
How do maneuvers like this serve the voters, or democracy in general?
Asha Rangappa posts an interesting analysis of why Harris dismissed Bash's turned-Black question, and how this tactic is driving Trump nuts.
Rangappa points to the Karpman Drama Triangle, which simplifies interpersonal conflicts down to three roles: persecutor, rescuer, and victim. From time to time Trump takes any of the roles, but his goal is always to wind up as the Victim, as in "I did everything right, and they indicted me."
By saying "Next question, please", Harris is refusing to strike back at Trump and give him something to play the Victim over.
In contrast to their criticism of Harris for avoiding interviews, the media often gives Trump credit for responding to questions. But they never ask him anything hard, like: "What were you planning to do with the classified documents you were keeping at Mar-a-Lago? And why did you tell the government you had given them all back when you hadn't?"
They don't ask such questions because they know what the response (which doesn't qualify as an "answer") would be: "That's a nasty question. You're the fake media."
Let's be honest: When Trump faces real questions, he never answers them. To this day, he hasn't given a coherent response to the charges in any of his four indictments. (Instead, he attacks the prosecutors, the judges, the FBI, the witnesses, the jurors, and the Biden administration. He makes sweeping denials like "I did nothing wrong." But he never addresses the evidence against him.) He complains that the media doesn't tell his side of the story, but that's because he has never settled on a single story to tell.
In view of all the stuff Trump has gotten away with (so far), I have to laugh at the attempt to drum up some Lilliputian Harris scandal. This week's attempt: She claims she worked at McDonalds, but never listed it on a resume. Does anybody applying for a job after law school list their fast-food summer jobs on their resumes?
The media often digs into the nuts-and-bolts inside-baseball of campaigning -- fund-raising, polls, ads, strategies -- but presents a very naive view of governing. They want a detailed picture of a candidate's policy proposals, as if presidents were kings who could simply decree those proposals into law.
That's how you get questions like Bash's "The steps that you’re talking about now, why haven’t you done them already?" A bunch of those "steps" -- codifying Roe v Wade protections, passing the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, passing the border bill, restoring the child tax credit -- have gone to Congress and been blocked by the House Republican majority. Others, like shifting the tax burden from the middle class to the billionaires, stand no chance of getting Republican support.
Every administration's policies are a compromise between the president's vision and what can get through Congress. Implicit in all of Harris' proposals is the assumption that Democrats will hold the Senate and regain the majority in the House.
During its first two years, when it had slim Democratic majorities, the Biden/Harris administration managed to get done an amazing number of things -- far more than Trump -- like funding infrastructure (which Trump kept promising but never accomplished), and beginning to transition away from a fossil-fuel economy that is leading to a climate-change apocalypse (a transition Trump wants to reverse with a drill-baby-drill policy, which somehow will make bacon cheaper). But no, they weren't able to implement the full Democratic change agenda. During the last two years, they have artfully kept MAGA nihilists in the House and Republican partisans on the Supreme Court from undoing all that progress, but they haven't managed to push further.
In this environment, ten-step plans are beside the point. Voters need to understand the sharp contrast in the underlying values of the two parties.
- Women have rights vs. wombs belong to the state.
- Save the planet for future generations vs. drill-baby-drill.
- Stand up for democracy vs. give in to Putin.
- Focus policy on the middle class vs. cut billionaires' taxes and wait for prosperity to trickle down.
- Support the rule of law vs. let presidents commit crimes and become autocrats.
How many details do you need to pick a side?
and the hostages
Six more Israeli hostages were found dead in Gaza over the weekend. According to AP:
Three of the six hostages found dead — including an Israeli-American — were reportedly scheduled to be released in the first phase of a cease-fire proposal discussed in July.
The deaths sparked massive protests in Israel yesterday, with protesters charging that the Netanyahu government is not doing enough to get the remaining hostages returned. The nation's largest union has announced a nationwide general strike to begin this morning.
The Biden administration perpetually claims to be on the verge of getting a hostages-for-ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas, but something always falls through at the last minute. Naturally, each side blames the other for not negotiating in good faith and not really wanting peace. It is difficult to criticize one side without seeming to endorse the other.
According to local authorities, more than 40,000 Palestinians have died as a result of the fighting in Gaza. It is never clear how many of them were Hamas warriors and how many were civilians in the wrong place at the wrong time.
and you also might be interested in ...
I've been wondering for some while about the persistent charges that Democrats support "abortion after birth". Since I've never seen a Democrat endorse the idea, or heard any examples of an after-birth abortions happening somewhere, I've assumed these are just lies.
But lies are usually based on something, even if reality has been grossly distorted by the time the claims get made. I think I've finally found the something in this case.
Back in 2022, California passed a law AB 2223, which protected women from prosecution after miscarriages.
The law came in response to the prosecution of two Kings County women who were criminally charged after having miscarriages. Though charges in both cases were dismissed, one woman spent 16 months in jail and the other spent nearly four years. The Kings County District Attorney has vowed to bring new charges in one case, according to CalMatters. According to Wicks’ office, at least 1,300 people have been criminally prosecuted for having miscarriages, stillbirths or self-managed abortions in the last 20 years.
AB 2223 and its author drew heavy criticism from the conservative anti-abortion movement, with some organizations, such as the California Family Council, alleging that the bill would effectively decriminalize infanticide. That is not true. The law does prevent pregnant people from being criminally charged in the event that an infant dies due to pregnancy-related causes. It does not decriminalize the killing of infants.
So if a miscarriage or self-managed abortion results in a baby who is alive but fatally damaged, the woman can't be charged if the baby dies from that damage.
Other states have since passed similar laws, resulting in the after-birth abortion rhetoric.
I still haven't got a handle on the feud between Elon Musk and Brazil's supreme court. But this week it led to the court ordering Brazilian ISPs to block the Twitter/X platform.
The dispute stems from X's usefulness as a tool for spreading dangerous disinformation, like bad health advice or incitement to political violence. Brazil demanded that X block certain disinformation-spreading accounts, which Musk called "censorship" and refused to do.
I'm sure many other countries are also worried about X and disinformation, so they are watching to see how this plays out.
Back in the 2000 campaign, Republicans would sum up Bush's charm advantage over Gore by asking which candidate you'd rather have a beer with (ignoring the fact that Bush was a recovering alcoholic who couldn't drink any more). In 2024, I propose a different test: Who would you rather go to the state fair with?
and let's close with something that takes training
Throwing out the first pitch is a longtime baseball ceremony that is typically used to call attention to some local celebrity or community leader. Some honorees wilt under the pressure of being watched by thousands, and bounce the ball to the plate or toss it so wide of the mark that it can't be caught.
But Wednesday, Shohei Ohtani's dog Decoy delivered a memorable first pitch for a game between Ohtani's Dodgers and the Baltimore Orioles. With Shohei behind the plate, Decoy squatted on the pitching rubber waiting for the sign, then picked up the baseball with his mouth and delivered it directly to his master, dropping it onto home.
Shohei also had a good game, hitting a home run and stealing two bases.
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