Olivia Nuzzi did more than anyone, next to the president himself in debate with Trump, to rip the mask off the no-longer-present President Joe Biden

But who is running the show right now?

And why is no one . . . alarmed?

 

 The worry is not that Biden will say something overly candid, or say something he didn’t mean to say, but that he will communicate through his appearance that he is not really there. ...

Biden instead was cocooned within mounting layers of bureaucracy, spoken for more than he was speaking or spoken to. ...

the traveling protective pool — the rotating group of reporters, run by the White House Correspondents’ Association ...

In April . . . My heart stopped as I extended my hand to greet the president. I tried to make eye contact, but it was like his eyes, though open, were not on. His face had a waxy quality.

-- Olivia Nuzzi, "The Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden", New York, July 4, 2024

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/conspiracy-of-silence-to-protect-joe-biden.html 

https://archive.ph/z0ULo#selection-1637.80-1637.190

That would be great, then Joe can resign and teach her a lesson

 

Kamala Harris Should Cut Joe Biden Loose

Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine

When you have to write articles like this with eight weeks to go lol

 How Kamala Harris Can Prove She’s Not a Flip-flopping Phony

Ed Kilgore, New York Magazine

Kamala Harris’s effort to depict herself as a candidate of safe but forward-looking change (as opposed to the decidedly unsafe and reactionary change represented by Donald Trump) has unsurprisingly spurred a host of GOP attacks on a cherry-picked assortment of unpopular or at least questionable-sounding policy positions from her past, ranging from support for a single-payer health-care system and sympathy for undocumented immigrants to opposition to fracking and to aggressive policing tactics.

 

Is Chris Cillizza, formerly of CNN, WaPo, Meet the Depressed, and PMSNBC cherry-picking?

 

I mean, most of these lists are incomplete because Harris' has left a LONG trail demonstrating her extreme leftism in speeches, interviews, tweets, policy statements from 2019, et cetera, and it's a daunting task to list them all. Any list of them will show an editor's bias about what's important in the editor's opinion.

But the idea from James Carville endorsed by Kilgore that Harris can just say she learned in the White House that spending $800 billion over ten years in the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act to reverse climate change was good enough when in 2019 she said it would take $1 trillion PER YEAR for ten years is just laughable.

 

LAUGHABLE.

That's hardly going to fly with the climate change left, let alone anyone else.

 

Ed Kilgore's just pretending that isn't the case. He's an enabler of Harris' silence in the face of the flip-flops.

 

 

 

 

That's all

 

Swap to Harris About Preventing Dem Down Ballot Collapse

Mollie Hemingway, FNS

 

It's about re-energizing its unhappy, loony base so they don't lose everything:

 

The Thrill of Taking a Risk on Harris

Rebecca Traister, New York Magazine

 

She's toast because the label stuck long ago and they can't get it off

 

How Harris Can Fight the ‘Too Liberal’ Label

Ed Kilgore, New York Magazine

Ew, so that's how we learned that in the 1980s

 Some NDAs include carve-ins allowing you to talk to a therapist or close friends; others include carve-outs for specific friends with loose lips. The terms can expire at the end of a project or on a specific date. David Bowie’s divorce NDA ended after ten years, at which point his ex-wife, Angela, went on TV and said she was now free to let the world know she had once walked in on Bowie in bed with Mick Jagger.

More. 

Now [2012], adding fuel to rumours that have for years abounded, a new book claims that Mick Jagger, 68, and David Bowie, 65, arguably the most dynamic and influential rock stars of their generation, were once lovers.

The incendiary claims, neatly timed with the 50th anniversary of the Rolling Stones' first gig, have been made by Christopher Andersen, author of Mick: The Wild Life and Mad Genius of Jagger.

Speaking with friends and family of the seemingly ageless rockers, at least four of the showmen's glamourous set have recalled stories of the men's antics. The two had a deep respect for each other, Mike (as Bowie knew Mick) admiring Bowie's creativity, and Bowie admiring Jagger's "financial genius" as the frontman of the Rolling Stones, writes Andersen. ...

The men frequently engaged in threesomes, but had a deeper emotional bond too, said Ava Cherry, a backing singer. She recalls some of their steamier moments together: "Even though I was in bed with them many times, I ended up just watching them have sex."

Bebe Buell, a Playboy model who had daughter Liv Tyler with Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler, recalls being pursued by Jagger, and went on to sleep with both men. She too claims that bedroom activity was wild and far from monogamous. "I used to get some pretty strange phone calls from Mick and David at three in the morning," she told Andersen, "inviting me to join them in bed with four gorgeous black women ... or four gorgeous black men."

But it was the moment that Bowie's wife Angie caught the two men in bed together that seems to cement the rumours. The blonde, with whom the singer had a son in 1970, Zowie Bowie (now Duncan Jones), says she one day found the men curled up in bed together, asleep. She said she "felt absolutely dead certain that they’d been [having sex]. It was so obvious, in fact, that I never even considered the possibility that they hadn’t been".

The rest is here.

Nate Cohn of New York Times/Siena College Poll: This time around, Joe Biden has become the broadly unlikeable one

  

 Donald Trump has never been popular. He’s still not popular. His unfavorability rating is just as high today as it was heading into Election Day 2020. This group of disengaged voters doesn’t like Donald Trump, and never did. What’s changed, to my mind, is that Joe Biden went from being a broadly appealing person — they didn’t necessarily love him, they didn’t necessarily even like him, but he was acceptable — to someone who many voters do not find acceptable anymore.

More.

Duh

 

What the Polls Say: RFK Jr. Hurting Biden, Helping Trump

Ed Kilgore, NY Magazine

That would be a fabulous way for Trump to waste his second term, just like the first

 

Will a 2nd Trump Presidency Try To Repeal Obamacare?

Jonathan Chait, NY Mag

 

Whatever he wastes it on, waste he will.

Everyone forgets that the Russians-tampering-with-voting-machines lunacy began in the Hillary camp in 2016, not in the Trump camp in 2020

 The group ... believes they’ve found persuasive evidence that results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked. ... the suspicious pattern merits an independent review — especially in light of the fact that the Obama White House has accused the Russian government of hacking the Democratic National Committee. 

Here. 

Hillary lost because blacks didn't turn out in Milwaukee, Detroit, and Philadelphia.  She underperformed Obama 2008 in 39 states.

The Russians didn't put the stink on her campaign.

She did that all by herself.

 

Rod Dreher goes hunting a confederacy of dunces, bags prey from The Week, National Review, Religion News Service, The New Republic, Reason, NYMag, and Vox

 

Adam Tooze's maternal grandparents were both commies, and the grandfather Arthur Wynn wasn't exposed as a Soviet spy until 2009, eight years after his death

Assiduously avoided here in "The Cult of Adam Tooze":

Another model Tooze said he looks to in his role as public intellectual is that of his maternal grandparents. “Leading synthesizers of global data on childhood nutrition,” Peggy and Arthur Wynn published research on poverty and family policy and together wrote a pseudonymous book attacking Tory business connections called England’s Money Lords. (Arthur was also, for a time, a Soviet-spy recruiter at Oxford.) They continued their work into their 90s. Arthur died over his word processor one night after Peggy had gone to bed; he was making a list of things to do.

 

Employment discrimination against the old: More than 50% over 50 get fired, almost all end up in low-wage jobs from then on

Sudden and harrowing downward mobility:

According to the Urban Institute, more than half of all workers over 50 in the U.S. eventually lose their jobs involuntarily, and 90 percent of those workers get consigned to lower-paying work for the rest of their careers.

I'm sick of headlines from Democrats claiming to defend the republic when they're out to destroy it

Like this one from the prince of liars Andrew Sullivan, the spokesman for the freak zone of democracy, not republicanism: Can the Republic Strike Back?

They don't care about the republic. If Democrats had their way, all the bulwarks of the republic would be gone already: the electoral college, the US Senate, the Supreme Court, borders, citizen-only-voting, law and order, the presumption of innocence, and on and on. They'd replace it all with a two-headed monster of populism, a country led only by the US House and a popularly-elected president, creatures of the mob. 

The rest of the republic has to go, and its defender, Donald Trump:

Congress has real power. The press can’t get his tax returns. Congress can. The press can’t truly discover the depth of the corruption in his administration. Congress can. The press can’t publicly cross-examine Cabinet members, order functionaries to answer questions, kill proposed legislation, and air everything where it should be aired — on Capitol Hill. ...

One-party rule has strained this democracy. The Electoral College, gerrymandering, the structure of the Senate, and demographics have given us a government actively indifferent and even hostile to half the country. That single party has now taken firm control of the Supreme Court as well. It will very likely retain control of the Senate in January. Capturing the House is the only way the republic can strike back.

John Brennan is the Democrats' self-admitted communist, James Comey is the Republicans'

Mr. Comey Goes To Washington (New York Magazine, 20 October 2003):

Comey has been savaged by William Safire and lauded by Chuck Schumer; just what kind of Republican is he, anyway? This sets Comey howling again. “I must be doing something right!” he says. “In college, I was left of center, and through a gradual process I found myself more comfortable with a lot of the ideas and approaches the Republicans were using.” He voted for Carter in 1980, but in ’84, “I voted for Reagan—I’d moved from Communist to whatever I am now. I’m not even sure how to characterize myself politically. Maybe at some point, I’ll have to figure it out.”

This nitwit from New Jersey thinks he can be president

Story here.

Trump beat Hillary in Ohio's 12th District 53% to 42% in 2016, Republicans barely held on to it yesterday

Last October yesterday's result was hardly thinkable:

Map makes Republicans strong favorites to retain Pat Tiberi's 12th Ohio congressional district

Total nonfarm employment has come a long way in Ohio, especially overperforming quite recently in vaulting well past the 5.6 million mark.

You'd think the voters had been more grateful yesterday, but like Hillary energizing Trump supporters by calling them deplorables, Republican Troy Balderson managed to get out the Democrat vote for his opponent by insulting part of his own district, in Franklin County.

All politics is local.

Frank Rich slams Gary Cohn in NY Mag, Cohn fires back in Bloomberg

Frank Rich on the 5th, here:

The Wall Street bandits escaped punishment, as did most of the banking houses where they thrived. Everyone else was stuck with the bill. ... But it’s a measure of how much the country is broken that we just shrug with resignation when the wealthy Democratic Goldman Sachs alum Gary Cohn joins this administration to secure an obscene tax cut, then exits without apology to enjoy his further enrichment at the expense of the safety net for the country’s most vulnerable citizens.

Gary Cohn here on the 6th:

In ’08 Facebook was one of those companies that was a big platform to criticize banks, they were very out front of criticizing banks for not being responsible citizens. I think banks were more responsible citizens in ’08 than some of the social media companies are today. And it affects everyone in the world. The banks have never had that much pull. ... In Washington nothing’s perfect, so I’m not thinking it’s perfect, it’s never going to be perfect. But the fact that we got something really important done, which is corporate tax reform, which made us competitive with the rest of the world, is good.

Frank Rich: The sole upside of the 2008 crash is that it exposed the kleptocratic Establishment of both parties

The chief kleptocrat, of course, was Bill Clinton, but Franky doesn't mention that, nor that his hero Barack Obama, who in the worst of economic times managed to come in third for increasing income inequality, is hard at work in retirement trying to catch up with him. Former President Carter, meanwhile, is building and restoring over 30 homes in Indiana for his 2018 work project. 

Still, it's a worthwhile read, if your indignation has been flagging of late.

In 2008, America Stopped Believing in the American Dream

Laugh of the Day: Good Lord, Jeeves, that QAnon thingy where people think a top government agent is speaking to them through 4chan has made it to one of my own family

Aunt Agatha, sir? Say it isn't so.

Story here.

"Wisdom in discourse with her loses discountenanc'd, and like folly shews." -- John Milton