Heather Cox Richardson

[milliefink]

August 12, 2024 (Monday)

The 2024 election is shaping up to be bizarre on the Republican side. The party’s presidential nominee, former president Donald Trump, has largely stayed home and posted on social media while his vice presidential running mate J.D. Vance has been trying to cover the campaigning for the team. Indeed, Vance’s offer on Wednesday during a rally in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, to debate Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris suggests that Vance is not unwilling to be seen as the face, if not the leader, of the Republican ticket.

The actual presidential nominee appears even more unstable than usual, and it certainly appears that his handlers are trying to keep him off stage. As Tom Nichols of The Atlantic noted yesterday, “When Trump is on TV a lot, his approval goes down. When he’s in hiding and his surrogates are rearranging his bonkers crazypants word salads into something like real thoughts, his approval goes up.”

Observers, including Jackie Calmes of the Los Angeles Times, have been clear that “Donald Trump’s state of mind should be under debate.” “Trump’s fire hose of cray-cray has inured Americans to his outrages,” Calmes wrote today. “But now that President Biden, a normal and empathetic man, has been pushed out of the 2024 race over concerns about his age and mental acuity, Trump’s more manifest unfitness for office should be ignored no longer—by the media, former advisors and military leaders who remain silent and, yes, Republicans.”

Trump held a surprise “press conference” on Thursday, where, according to a team of reporters and editors at NPR, he misstated things, exaggerated, or lied outright at least 162 times in 64 minutes, a rate of more than two times a minute.

He said that the United States “is in the most dangerous position it’s ever been in from an economic standpoint,” and warned we could end up in another depression like the Great Depression of the 1930s. In fact, the economy is strong and growing at a faster rate than it did in three of the four years of Trump’s presidency.

He warned of a national crime wave although crime has been plummeting after a surge in 2020, during Trump’s term, and said that we are “very close to a world war,” which illustrates that Trump’s main lever to turn out voters is fear. With the successes of the Biden-Harris administration having neutralized the economic fears that worked in the past, and with the goals of antiabortion activists achieved in 2022 with the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, Trump is apparently going for broke with the threat of World War III.

Altogether, the event did Trump no favors.

Poll numbers for Harris and her running mate Minnesota governor Tim Walz have climbed since President Joe Biden announced on July 21 he would not accept the Democratic nomination, and observers have reported that Trump’s anger is leading him into unforced errors, picking fights with allies and seemingly unable to let go of his focus on the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him, a focus that his advisors warn is turning off voters.

Trump has repeatedly seemed to fantasize that Biden will return to the head of the Democratic ticket, and on Sunday, seemingly frantic about Harris’s huge rallies while he can no longer attract big crowds, released a rant accusing Vice President Harris of using AI to create fake footage showing large groups of supporters greeting her airplane. Faking crowds with AI is a technique we know Trump uses, but there is no evidence Harris does. Immediately, people who attended her events released their own videos proving the size of the crowds, and political pundits openly questioned Trump’s mental health.

Then, this morning, Trump posted on his social media channel: “I’m doing really well in the Presidential Race, leading in almost all of the REAL Polls, and this despite the Democrats unprecedentedly changing their Primary Winning Candidate, Sleepy Joe Biden, midstream.” He went on until his closing: “We are going to WIN BIG and take our Country back from the Radical Left Losers, Fascists, and Communists. We will, very quickly, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” This afternoon, Five Thirty Eight showed Harris up 2.7 points in the national polling average.

Trump’s advisors are pleading with him to stop name-calling and to stay on message. His campaign began today to run ads on X that look like his tweets but are much more like standard political ads.

Tonight, X owner Elon Musk planned to “interview” Trump, although it seemed pretty clear the event was intended simply to be a long advertisement for him. European Union commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton wrote an open letter to Musk warning about E.U. laws against amplifying harmful content “that promotes hatred, disorder, incitement to violence, or certain instances of disinformation.” Breton warned that his team “will be extremely vigilant” about protecting “E.U. citizens from serious harm.” Musk responded with a meme that said: “TAKE A BIG STEP BACK AND LITERALLY, F*CK YOUR OWN FACE!”

Last month the European Union charged X with failing to respect its social media law by letting disinformation and illegal content run rampant. X faces fines of up to several million euros.

In the end, technical difficulties delayed the start of the X Spaces event. Instead, wrote BBC journalist Shayan Sardarizadeh, who specializes in exposing disinformation, a “deepfake livestream of the Trump-Musk interview” was playing “on a fake Tesla channel on YouTube, with 200,000 people watching.” Sardarizadeh noted that the channel was running a crypto scam, and YouTube finally suspended it. When the real X channel finally began to function, it showed Musk and Trump heaping praise on each other. But Trump was slurring his words, and when HuffPost White House journalist S.V. Dáte asked the campaign about his inability to articulate, it answered: “Must be your sh*tty hearing. Get your ears checked out.”

Trump went to Montana on Friday in support of Republican candidate Tim Sheehy, who is running to unseat popular Democrat Jon Tester, but otherwise has said he is not planning to hit the road until after the Democratic National Convention concludes next week, an odd lack of campaigning at this point in a presidential contest. He seems to be trying to regain control of the political narrative through tweets and social media. Today he said he is suing the government over the raid on Mar-a-Lago that recovered hundreds of classified national security documents, but this is almost certainly posturing to try to make him look strong: he would never be willing to undergo the discovery phase of such a lawsuit.

In the midst of Trump’s frenzy, J.D. Vance has been doing the usual appearances of a campaign, although, unable to generate rally crowds himself, he has been reduced to following Harris and Walz to theirs and trying to grab headlines there.

On Sunday he did the rounds of the morning talk shows, where on CNN he complained that Democrats are bullying him by calling the MAGA Republicans “weird.” Political journalist Brian Tyler Cohen promptly answered: “Crooked Hillary, Crazy Nancy Pelosi, Sleepy Joe, Coco Chow, Lyin Ted, Ron DeSanctimonious, Birdbrain Nikki Haley, Old Crow McConnell, Gavin Newscum, Pencil Neck Schiff, Pocahontas, Cryin Chuck, and Kamabla would all like a word.”

Republicans have made punching down a key part of their rhetoric since at least the 1980s, and Vance’s frustration that the tables have turned feels a bit as if someone is finally standing up to the schoolyard bully.

Outside of the MAGA frenzy, Harris and Walz last week held big, joyous rallies in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada, contrasting their happy campaign with the MAGA Republicans’ drumbeat of carnage and revenge. A cover article from Time magazine today by Charlotte Alter described the scene of one of her rallies as a mashup of a Beyoncé concert, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, and “the early days of Barack Obama”: “a kind of reception a Democratic presidential candidate hasn’t gotten in years. Fans packed into overflow spaces, waving homemade signs made of glitter and glue as drumlines roared. When Harris introduced her new running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, the cheering lasted more than a minute.”

At the same time, the grave issues that are propelling the Democrats continue to gain traction. The Associated Press today reported that in the wake of the 2022 Dobbs decision, more than 100 pregnant women have been treated negligently or turned away from emergency rooms despite federal law. Two women, each of whom lost a fallopian tube to an undertreated ectopic pregnancy—one also lost 75% of one of her ovaries, and the other nearly bled to death—have asked the federal government to investigate whether the hospitals that sent them home to miscarry without medical assistance violated federal law.

On Saturday, Trump’s campaign said it had been hacked, after Politico reported that it had received communication from an account called “Robert” about internal Trump campaign documents. David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo put together a helpful timeline of the story today, explaining that on Sunday the Washington Post said it had also received some of that information and said it believed the information to be that referred to in an August 9 warning from Microsoft that Iran was engaged in an influence campaign. Today the New York Times also said it had received the information, and this afternoon the FBI said it is investigating attempted hacking against both the Trump-Vance and Harris-Walz campaigns.

CNN national security and justice reporter Zachary Cohen reported tonight that the hackers apparently were able to access the campaign by compromising the personal email account of Trump operative Roger Stone.

“Buckle up,” Chris Krebs, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, wrote on X. “Someone is running the 2016 playbook, expect continued efforts to stoke fires in society and go after election systems—95% votes on paper ballots is a strong resilience measure, combined with audits. But the chaos is the point….”

[milliefink]

August 13, 2024 (Tuesday)

On August 14, 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law. While he had already put in place new measures to regulate business and banking and had provided temporary work relief to combat the Depression, this law permanently changed the nature of the American government.

The Social Security Act established a federal system of old-age benefits; unemployment insurance; aid to homeless, dependent, and neglected children; funds to promote maternal and child welfare; and public health services. It was a sweeping reworking of the relationship of the government to its citizens, using the power of taxation to pool funds to provide a basic social safety net.

The driving force behind the law was FDR’s secretary of labor, Frances Perkins. She was the first woman to hold a position in the U.S. Cabinet and still holds the record for having the longest tenure in that job: she lasted from 1933 to 1945.

Perkins brought to the position a vision of government very different from that of the Republicans who had run it in the 1920s. While men like President Herbert Hoover had embraced the idea of a “rugged individualism” in which men provided for their families on their own, Perkins recognized that the vision of a hardworking man supporting his wife and children was more myth than reality: her own husband suffered from bipolar disorder, making her the family’s primary support. She understood that Americans had always supported each other.

As a child, Perkins spent summers with her grandmother, with whom she was very close, in the small town of Newcastle, Maine, where she witnessed a supportive community. In college, at Mount Holyoke, she majored in chemistry and physics, but after a professor required students to tour a factory to observe working conditions, Perkins became committed to improving the lives of those trapped in industrial jobs. After college, Perkins became a social worker and, in 1910, earned a masters degree in economics and sociology from Columbia University. She became the head of the New York office of the National Consumers League, urging consumers to use their buying power to demand better conditions and wages for the workers who made the products they were buying.

The next year, in 1911, she witnessed a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in which 146 workers, mostly women and girls, died. They were trapped in the building when the fire broke out because the factory owner had ordered the doors to the stairwells and exits locked to make sure no one slipped outside for a break. Unable to escape the smoke and fire in the factory, the workers—some of them on fire—leaped from the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors of the building, dying on the pavement.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire proved to Perkins that voluntary organizations would never be enough to improve workers’ lives. She turned toward using the government to adjust the harsh conditions of industrialization. She began to work with the Democratic politicians at Tammany Hall, who presided over communities in the city that mirrored rural towns and who exercised a form of social welfare for their voters, making sure they had jobs, food, and shelter and that wives and children had a support network if a husband and father died. In that system the voices of women like Perkins were valuable, for their work in the immigrant wards of the city meant that they were the ones who knew what working families needed to survive.

The overwhelming unemployment, hunger, and suffering during the Great Depression convinced Perkins that state governments alone could not adjust the conditions of the modern world to create a safe, supportive community for ordinary people. She came to believe, as she said: “The people are what matter to government, and a government should aim to give all the people under its jurisdiction the best possible life.”

Perkins met FDR through her Tammany connections, and when he asked her to be his secretary of labor, she told him that she wanted the federal government to provide unemployment insurance, health insurance, and old-age insurance. She later recalled: “I remember he looked so startled, and he said, ‘Well, do you think it can be done?’”

Creating federal unemployment insurance became her primary concern. Congressmen had little interest in passing such legislation, claiming that unemployment insurance and federal aid to dependent families would undermine a man’s willingness to work. But Perkins recognized that the Depression had added pressure to the idea of social insurance by emphasizing the needs of older Americans. In Long Beach, California, Dr. Francis Townsend had looked out of his window one day to see elderly women rooting through garbage cans for food. Appalled, he came up with a plan to help the elderly and stimulate the economy at the same time. Townsend proposed that the government provide every retired person over 60 years old with $200 a month, on the condition that they spend it within 30 days, a condition designed to stimulate the economy.

Townsend’s plan was wildly popular. More than that, though, it sparked people across the country to start coming up with their own plans for protecting the elderly and the nation’s social fabric.

It also spurred Congress to action. Perkins recalled that Townsend “startled the Congress of the United States because the aged have votes. The wandering boys didn’t have any votes; the evicted women and their children had very few votes. If the unemployed didn’t stay long enough in any one place, they didn’t have a vote. But the aged people lived in one place and they had votes, so every Congressman had heard from the Townsend Plan people.”

FDR put together a committee to come up with a plan, but committee members could not make up their minds how to move forward. Perkins continued to hammer on the idea they must come up with something, and finally locked the members of the committee in a room. As she recalled: “Well, we locked the door and we had a lot of talk. I laid out a couple of bottles of something or other to cheer their lagging spirits. Anyhow, we stayed in session until about 2 a.m. We then voted finally, having taken our solemn oath that this was the end; we were never going to review it again.”

By the time the bill came to a vote, it was hugely popular. The vote was 371 to 33 in the House and 77 to 6 in the Senate.

When asked to describe the origins of the Social Security Act, Perkins mused that its roots came from the very beginnings of the nation. When Alexis de Toqueville wrote Democracy in America in 1835, she noted, he thought Americans were uniquely “so generous, so kind, so charitably disposed.” “Well, I don’t know anything about the times in which De Tocqueville visited America,” she said, but “I do know that at the time I came into the field of social work, these feelings were real.”

With the Social Security Act, Perkins helped to write into our laws a longstanding political impulse in America that stood in dramatic contrast to the 1920s philosophy of rugged individualism. She recognized that the ideas of community values and pooling resources to keep the economic playing field level and take care of everyone are at least as deeply seated in our political philosophy as the idea of every man for himself.

In a 1962 speech recalling the origins of the Social Security Act, Perkins reflected: “Of course, the Act had to be amended, and has been amended, and amended, and amended, and amended, until it has now grown into a large and important project, for which, by the way, I think the people of the United States are deeply thankful. One thing I know: Social Security is so firmly embedded in the American psychology today that no politician, no political party, no political group could possibly destroy this Act and still maintain our democratic system. It is safe. It is safe forever, and for the everlasting benefit of the people of the United States.” In 2014, Perkins’s Maine home was designated a National Historic Landmark.

But in 2024 it is no longer guaranteed that Social Security is “safe forever.” The Republican Party has called repeatedly for cuts to the popular program. As recently as March 2024, the Republican Study Committee, which includes the Republican House leadership and about 80% of House Republicans, said it is “committed to protecting and strengthening” Social Security by raising the retirement age and cutting benefits for those who are not yet approaching retirement. The Heritage Foundation, the main organization behind Project 2025, said in June that the retirement age should be raised.

There was such an outcry over that plan that Republicans backed away from it. By July, the Republicans promised in their 2024 platform to “FIGHT FOR AND PROTECT SOCIAL SECURITY…WITH NO CUTS, INCLUDING NO CHANGES TO THE RETIREMENT AGE,” but offered no plan for making it solvent except further deregulation and tax cuts. Indeed, Trump’s recent promise to end federal taxes on Social Security benefits for wealthier recipients could, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, increase the budget deficit by $1.6 to $1.8 trillion by 2036, making the plan insolvent two years earlier than currently projected.

As Minnesota governor, Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate Tim Walz expanded the state tax exemption for Social Security, eliminating it for most seniors but not affecting the program’s solvency. One hundred and eighty-eight Democrats have cosponsored the Social Security 2100 Act, which expands Social Security benefits and raises payroll taxes on those who earn more than $400,000 a year to pay for it.

[Mindysan33]

Frances Perkins ruled!

[milliefink]

August 14, 2024 (Wednesday)

The July report for consumer prices from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which came out today, showed that prices rose less than 3% in the previous twelve months. Core inflation has fallen to its lowest rate since April 2021. For well over a year, wages have grown faster than inflation.

President Joe Biden cheered the news but added in a statement, “Prices are still too high. Large corporations are sitting on record profits and not doing enough to lower prices. That’s why we are taking on Big Pharma to lower prescription drug prices. We’re cutting red tape to build more homes while taking on corporate landlords that unfairly increase rent. And we’re taking on price gouging and junk fees to lower everyday costs from groceries to air travel.”

When a reporter asked Biden if the U.S. has beaten inflation, Biden answered: “Yes, Yes, Yes. I told you we were going to have a soft landing…. My policies are working. Start writing that way.”

Just yesterday, the administration announced $100 million worth of investments in new housing in the form of grants to state and local governments to spur the production of new housing. Kriston Capps of Bloomberg reports that “more housing units are under construction now than at any point in half a century—some 60,000 multifamily units were completed in June alone—and rents are stabilizing in some areas as a result.”

Single-family home construction is slower, and with Senate Republicans having blocked a $78 billion tax deal that would support housing tax credits that promote the construction of housing, the White House is finding other ways to spur housing construction.

On Monday the White House continued its attempt to protect the interests of consumers after years in which they lost ground. Continuing to combat junk fees, it proposed rules to fight back against “all the ways that corporations—through excessive paperwork, hold times, and general aggravation—add unnecessary headaches and hassles to people’s days and degrade their quality of life.”

Companies deliberately design processes to be burdensome in order to deter people from getting a refund or a rebate, or canceling a membership or a subscription. Those frustrations waste money and time, the administration said, and after listing some of its own proposals for making it easier to navigate ending subscriptions or activating insurance coverage, it invited Americans to submit their own on a public portal.

In a speech on Friday in North Carolina, Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to take on the issue of price gouging by large corporations. Researchers for U.K. think tanks Institute for Public Policy Research and Common Wealth found in late 2023 that profiteering, or “greedflation,” “significantly” boosted prices, leading to increases of 30% or more in corporate profits. “Excessive profits were even larger in the US, where many important sections of the economy are dominated by a few powerful companies,” wrote Phillip Inman of The Guardian.

Responding to today’s news that inflation is coming down, the stock market ticked up in expectation that the Fed will now be more likely to cut interest rates in September.

The White House took notice today of the fact that applications for small businesses continue to boom across the country, with 19 million new business applications since Vice President Harris and President Biden took office, an annual growth rate 90% higher than prepandemic averages. The White House also noted that congressional Republicans are trying to cut the Small Business Administration and to cut taxes for big corporations.

Politico greeted today’s economic news with a headline saying, “Inflation is easing. Now, Harris has an even bigger problem with the economy.” And the New York Times reported that in a speech in North Carolina, “Harris Is Set to Lay Out an Economic Message Light on Details,” adding that she is expected to tweak Biden administration themes “in a bid to turn the Democratic economic agenda into an asset.”

The United States economy under Biden and Harris has been the strongest in the world, and now that inflation seems to be under control as well, Harris needs to turn that record “into an asset”? Political journalist James Fallows wrote: “Now they are all just driving trollies us.”

The Biden-Harris administration has changed the orientation of the United States government from relying on markets to order society and protecting the interests of wealthy Americans in the expectation that they would invest in the economy more efficiently than they could if the government interfered by protecting workers and consumers. Biden and Harris, along with the cabinet officers and staff of the executive branch, revived an older ideology calling for the government to promote the interests of the American people as a whole. This means regulating business and providing government services and oversight to make sure no interest can run the table.

What the two different worldviews look like was on display earlier this month, when Republicans and a few Democrats in the Senate killed a bipartisan expansion of the child tax credit, a tax break for parents with dependent children. A hike in that credit during the pandemic cut child poverty dramatically, only for that rate to bounce back when the pandemic relief expired and dropped five million U.S. children back into poverty in 2022. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted that the change “underscores the fact that the number of children living in poverty is a policy choice.”

On January 31, 2024, the House passed an expansion of the child tax credit that was smaller than the one in place during the pandemic, and Republican vice presidential hopeful Ohio senator J.D. Vance, who has been criticized for comments about “childless cat ladies,” seemed to support the measure when he said, “If you’re raising children in this country, we should make it easier, not harder. And unfortunately it’s way too expensive and way too difficult.” He then falsely accused Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris of calling for ending the child tax credit (she has actually called for expanding it).

But Vance missed the vote, and before it, Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) told colleagues that passing the bill would “give Harris a win before the election.” According to Chabeli Carranzana of The 19th, Tillis “printed out fake checks made out to ‘millions of American voters’ with the memo: ‘Don’t forget to vote for Kamala!’”

The two different worldviews were also on display Monday night when Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump complimented X owner Elon Musk for firing workers who threatened to strike. The right to strike is protected under federal labor law, and the Biden-Harris administration has stood firmly for workers’ rights.

On Tuesday the United Auto Workers union filed charges against Trump and Musk with the National Labor Relations Board for threatening and intimidating workers. “When we say Trump stands against everything our union stands for, this is what we mean,” said UAW president Shawn Fain.

Tonight, Trump gave a speech in Asheville, North Carolina, that was supposed to be about the economy. Before he could appear, Trump had to pay the city $82,247.60 in advance, with city officials apparently concerned about the candidate’s habit of skipping out on costs associated with his rallies. Once on stage, he tossed economic issues overboard and concentrated on personal attacks on Biden and Harris, along with stream-of-consciousness musings on tampons and socialism. Apparently speaking of his campaign aides, he said: They wanted to do a speech on the economy. They say it’s the most important subject. I’m not sure it is.”

The era of unfettered markets and the concentration of wealth may be coming to an end. In late July, the finance leaders of the Group of 20 (G20), a forum of the world’s major economies, agreed to cooperate on fair taxation of "ultra-high-net-worth individuals,” although they did not agree as to whichinternational body should lead.

But yesterday, Joe Perticone of The Bulwark noted that MAGA Republicans appear to have figured out a way to use the struggle over the nation’s economic ideology to elect Trump.

The House recessed in late July having failed to pass a single one of the 12 appropriations bills the government needs to stay in operation because, although the appropriations bills are traditionally kept “clean” of anything extraneous, extremist members of the House Freedom Caucus insist on making extreme cuts and adding their culture war items to the bills. Congress doesn’t reconvene until early September, and the new fiscal year starts on October 1, leaving the House very little time to pass the necessary bills.

Yesterday, members of the House Freedom Caucus called for Republicans to return to Washington, D.C., to pass the bills “to cut spending and advance our policy priorities.” If they can’t pass the bills—and they failed all spring—the extremists want a short-term fix just into “President Trump’s second term.” But they also want the fix to include the SAVE Act, “as called for by President Trump—to prevent noncitizens from voting [and] to preserve free and fair elections in light of the millions of illegal aliens imported by the Biden-Harris administration over the last four years.”

It is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. As Perticone notes, Trump’s own 2017 commission to find evidence that undocumented immigrants voted in 2016 disbanded without finding any, and another audit, led by Georgia Republicans before the 2022 midterms, found not a single successful attempt of noncitizens to vote in the previous five years.

Perticone reports that the measure is designed to suppress legitimate Democratic voting and, if Trump still loses, by claiming that Trump lost, again, because the election was stolen by illegal voters.

Trump continues to insist that Biden’s replacement at the top of the Democratic ticket was a “coup,” partly because he wants to face off against Biden, rather than Harris. But he also is priming his supporters to believe that those Americans who want the government to work for them rather than the very wealthy are illegitimate.

[gatto]

@milliefink

The United States economy under Biden and Harris has been the strongest in the world, and now that inflation seems to be under control as well, Harris needs to turn that record “into an asset”? Political journalist James Fallows wrote: “Now they are all just driving trollies us.”

i think it’s something like this, and we’re the ones on the tracks

( also, off topic: i just realized that the sign on the front reads: ethics express. )

[danimagoo]

@milliefink

Companies deliberately design processes to be burdensome in order to deter people from getting a refund or a rebate, or canceling a membership or a subscription.

Hang Green just did a video about his experience with this. It’s worth a watch.

Why isn't This Illegal?

[chenille]

They also pass by a movie theater playing “Strangers Under a Train” and “Bend It Like Bentham”.

[milliefink]

August 15, 2024 (Thursday)

In 2021 a study by the RAND Corporation found that drug prices average 2.56 times higher in the U.S. than in 32 other countries. For name brand drugs, U.S. prices were 3.44 times those in comparable nations. Almost exactly two years ago, on August 16, 2022, President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law. Among other things, that law permitted Medicare to negotiate drug prices, a provision about 83% of voters supported.

Republicans opposed the measure, siding with drug company executives who insist that high prices are necessary to create an incentive for drug companies to innovate, as their investment in research and development depends on the revenue they expect from new drugs. Ultimately, not a single Republican voted for the Inflation Reduction Act itself, and Vice President Kamala Harris cast the tie-breaking vote that gave the act the votes to go to the president’s desk.

About a year later, on August 29, 2023, the government announced the first ten drugs over whose prices it would negotiate on behalf of about 65 million Medicare recipients. The ten drugs are among those with the highest total spending in Medicare Part D, which is the Medicare plan that covers drugs administered at home. The original plan for Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 covered drugs administered in health care settings, but it was not until 2003, after almost 40 years of medical innovation had significantly changed our management of chronic illnesses, that Congress included those drugs someone takes at home. At the time, to get Republicans behind the bill, Congress explicitly prohibited the government from negotiating the prices of medications.

Today the Biden-Harris administration announced it has reached agreements with pharmaceutical companies for those ten drugs. The new prices offer discounts of from 38% to 79% off list prices. The new prices would have saved the government an estimated $6 billion last year if they had been in effect. About 9 million people take those drugs and will save about $1.5 billion out of pocket after the new prices go into effect on January 1, 2026.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services expects to select the next 15 drugs for negotiation by February 1, 2025, although Trump and the Republicans have vowed to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act conferring on the government the ability to negotiate drug prices, so a Trump-Vance victory would presumably change that plan.

Speaking together in Maryland today for the first time since Biden announced he would not accept the Democratic nomination for president and instead endorsed Vice President Harris, Biden and Harris praised the drug negotiations and each other.

We’re in a weird moment, in which the press seems to be demanding detailed policy positions from Vice President Harris as she tries to win the presidency in 2024, while putting little comparable pressure on former president Donald Trump, who is the Republican presidential nominee.

Yesterday the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that inflation had fallen below 3% for the past year while economic growth continues strong and unemployment is low, putting us in what some call a “Goldilocks economy,” neither too hot nor too cold. Today, news broke that retail sales were up 1%, higher than expected, and the stock market rallied, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average ending the day over 40,000.

There is every reason to think that a Harris presidency will continue the policies that put the U.S. in such an enviable position. Nonetheless, a reporter today asked President Biden: “How much does it bother you that Vice President Harris might soon, for political reasons, start to distance herself from your economic plan?” Biden responded: “She’s not going to.” Another asked: “Will Bidenomics continue under Vice President Harris?” The president responded: “It doesn’t matter what the hell you call it, the economy is going to continue. With… all the legislation we passed, it’s working. In case you haven’t noticed, it’s working.”

In contrast, Trump has been unable to articulate any actual policies for an economic program. After yesterday’s planned economic speech became a rant, he called reporters to his property in Bedminster, New Jersey, today for what was billed as a press conference about the economy. He appeared before a table with containers of coffee and breakfast cereal, but the reason for those props never became clear.

He began the event by reading from a script that rehashed the greatest hits of the 1950s, saying: “Kamala Harris is a radical California liberal who broke the economy, broke the border, and broke the world, frankly.” He claimed that Harris has “a very strong communist lean” and is in favor of “the death of the American dream.” He predicted a stock market crash like that of 1929 and warned that “you’re all going to be thrown into a communist system…where everybody gets health care.” As he spoke, on the Fox News Channel, a stock ticker in the corner of the screen showed the stock market over 40,563. Trump spoke nonstop for an hour—essentially garnering free press coverage by advertising that he would take questions—before taking questions for another hour, during which he said of his strategy, “All we have to do is define our opponent as being a communist or a socialist or somebody that’s gonna destroy our country."

He never got around to talking about the coffee and breakfast cereal.

CNN fact checker Daniel Dale called it “a whole bunch of nonsense.”

In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, earlier today, Republican vice presidential candidate Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH) said: “We actually have the plans, we have the policies, to accomplish this stuff—that’s a big thing that sets us apart from Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.”

In fact, the Republican Party platform lists things like “END INFLATION, AND MAKE AMERICA AFFORDABLE AGAIN,” but Trump’s promises to deport more than 10 million migrants and to put a tariff wall around the country are both highly inflationary measures. Sixteen economists who have won Nobel prizes said in June that Trump’s policies would fuel inflation. They lauded the Biden-Harris administration’s policies and wrote: “We believe that a second Trump term would have a negative impact on the U.S.'s economic standing in the world, and a destabilizing effect on the U.S.'s domestic economy.”

To the degree there is an actual set of policies in place on the Republican side, more evidence appeared today to suggest those policies are those set by the 2025 Project, no matter how strongly Trump has tried to distance himself from it.

Two men associated with the British nonprofit Centre for Climate Reporting secretly video recorded one of the key authors of Project 2025, Christian nationalist Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump and the budget director for the extremist Republican Study Committee. In the recording, released today, Vought assured the men, who he thought might donate to the cause, that he and his Center for Renewing America were secretly writing a blueprint of executive orders, memos, and regulations that Trump could enact immediately upon taking office a second time.

Vought assured the men that Trump was only disavowing Project 2025 for political reasons. In reality, Vought said, Trump is “very supportive of what we do.” Vought also said that he does not believe the president is bound by the Posse Comitatus Act, an 1878 law that prohibits the use of federal troops for law enforcement purposes against U.S. citizens. “The President has, you know, the ability both along the border and elsewhere to maintain law and order with the military,” Vought said. “And that’s something that, you know, it’s going to be important for, for him to remember and his lawyers to affirm.” In summer 2020, defense officials stopped Trump from mobilizing active duty troops against protesters.

Project 2025 calls for gutting the nonpartisan civil service and replacing it with people loyal to a strong president, and making the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense loyal to the president. With the power concentrated in the president, the government would enforce strict Christian nationalist ideals, revoking the rights of LGBTQ+ people, women, and immigrants and racial minorities.

Yesterday, Jill Lawrence of The Bulwark noted that Trump and his allies don’t even need to enact all of Project 2025: simply gutting the nonpartisan civil service and filling almost 2 million government jobs with those who are loyal to Trump “above even laws, courts, security, liberty, the ‘general welfare,’ and the rest of the Constitution” would be enough to destroy the country as we know it.

Think Aileen Cannon, the Trump-appointed judge who dismissed the federal case charging Trump for retaining classified documents, or House speaker Mike Johnson, who killed a bipartisan border security bill because Trump wanted to keep the issue of immigration open so he could campaign on it. Trump could install into official positions doctors who endorse quack health remedies, or officials who nod as Trump changes the trajectory of a tropical storm with a Sharpie. “Personnel is policy,” Project 2025’s authors say, and, if elected, Trump has vowed to have his own loyalists take over the United States government.

But Americans largely oppose Project 2025 and the Trump agenda, even in its vague state. In his appearance in Maryland today, Biden mocked Trump and added: “You may have heard about the MAGA Republican Project 2025 plan. They want to repeal Medicare’s power to negotiate drug prices, let Big Pharma get back to charging whatever they want. Let me tell ya what our Project 2025 is—beat the hell out of ‘em.”

[milliefink]

August 16, 2024 (Friday)

The complaint of Republican vice presidential candidate Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH) last weekend on CNN that Democrats are bullying him by calling him weird has stuck with me. As I wrote at the time, Republicans have made punching down their stock in trade for decades, and Vance’s complaint suggests that the Democrats are finally pushing back. It strikes me that behind this shifting power dynamic is a huge story about American politics.

Since the 1950s, those determined to get rid of business regulation, social welfare programs, government infrastructure spending, and federal protection of civil rights have relied on a rhetorical structure that centers “real” Americans who allegedly want nothing from government and warns that un-American forces who want government handouts are undermining the country by bringing socialism or racial, gender, or religious equality.

In 2024, that rhetoric is all the MAGA Republicans have left to attract voters, as their actual policies are unpopular. Yesterday, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump told reporters at his Bedminster availability that to win the 2024 election: “All we have to do is define our opponent as being a communist or a socialist or somebody that’s gonna destroy our country."

But it is not just Trump. A MAGA pundit has called Vice President Harris “Hitler and Stalin combined but times 200,” and on Wednesday, Republicans in Minnesota nominated Royce White as their candidate for the U.S. Senate. “We face an enemy that intends to bastardize our citizenship through an idea called globalism,” White has said. “We must begin to understand how the global affects the local and take a stand for God, Family, and Country.” White has also said that “women have become too mouthy,” and that “Donald Trump could get up on stage, pull his pants down, take a sht up at the podium, and I still would never vote for you fcking Democrats again.”

The rhetorical strategy setting up Republicans against a dangerous “other” was behind Trump’s demand that Republicans in Congress kill a bipartisan border bill so that Trump could continue to demonize immigrants. You could see that demonization of immigrants today in Vance’s straight-up lie that Vice President Kamala Harris “wants to give $25,000 to illegal aliens to buy American homes.” In fact, Harris today called for Congress to expand plans already in place in the Biden administration, and none of those plans call for giving money to undocumented migrants.

Also in that vein today was the announcement of Representative James Comer (R-KY), chair of the House Oversight Committee, that he is opening an investigation into Minnesota governor Tim Walz’s work in China. Walz is the Democratic vice presidential nominee. He went to China in 1989 as part of a teach-abroad program and went on to coordinate trips for students in China, becoming a vocal advocate for human rights in that country as leaders cracked down on opposition. But by suggesting this cultural exchange is nefarious, Comer can seed the idea that Walz is somehow operating against the interests of the United States.

This longstanding rhetoric that positions Republicans as true Americans defending the country against those who would destroy it has metastasized into the determination of MAGA Republicans to replace American democracy with a Christian nationalism that cements the power of white patriarchy. Vance has been in hot water for his derogatory remarks about “childless cat ladies”; interviews have resurfaced in the past few days in which he embraced the idea that the role of “the postmenopausal female” is to take care of grandchildren.

The New College of Florida is in the news today for illustrating the logical progression of the idea that Republicans must protect the nation from those who would destroy it. The New College of Florida was at the center of Republican governor Ron DeSantis’s program to get rid of traditional academic freedom. He stripped the New College of its independence and replaced officials with Christian loyalists who tried to build a school modeled after those that Viktor Orbán’s loyalists took over in Hungary. New College officials painted over student murals celebrating diversity, suppressed student support for civil rights, and voted to eliminate the diversity, equity, and inclusion office and the gender studies program. Faculty fled the New College, and more than a quarter of the students dropped out. To keep its numbers up, the school dropped its admission standards.

Yesterday, Steven Walker of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported that the school cleared out the Gender and Diversity Center, throwing the books it had accumulated into a dumpster. Officials said the books are no longer serving the needs of the college: “gender studies has been discontinued as an area of concentration at New College and the books are not part of any official college collection or inventory.”

The image of piles of books in a dumpster in the United States of America is not easily forgettable.

But the dominance rhetoric of the MAGA Republicans was never just about political power. Political power always went hand in hand with corruption. A new book by Joe Conason called The Longest Con notes that the modern right-wing movement has its roots in the promise of grifters after World War II to protect America against the communists they insisted were infiltrating the country. Their promises to defend true Americans against an enemy was always about getting cash out of the deal.

Conason emphasizes how drumming up fears of an “other” was a deliberate grift to put money into the pockets of those who told small donors that their dollars were vital for defending the United States. The biggest prize for the extremists, though, was the control of government purse strings that allowed them to turn federal and state largesse toward their own cronies. Conason notes that under President Ronald Reagan, Republicans’ cuts to government oversight and reliance on the private sector to regulate itself, along with their belief that unfettered capitalism was a form of resistance to communism, led to a boom in corruption.

That corruption has continued in the Republican Party, largely unaddressed as politicians insisted that those calling it out were simply un-American malcontents engaging in political hits against good, patriotic Americans. In contrast, as any corruption on the Democratic side can be expected to be sliced and diced in public, the Democrats have stayed relatively clean.

And this is why Vance’s comment about Democrats bullying him jumped out at me. Republican dominance is cracking as Trump struggles and Vance offends people, and as that dominance falls away, the many things it covered are starting to get attention—among them, stories of Republican corruption. And they’re doozies.

On Sunday, for example, Garrett Shanley of the Independent Florida Alligator, the student newspaper of the University of Florida, reported that when former senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) took over the presidency of the University of Florida, he “channeled millions” to his Republican allies and to secretive contracts. In 17 months he more than tripled spending from his office, with most of the money going to his former aides and political friends, most of whom continued to live and work outside the state. Sasse was appointed in November 2022 in an opaque hiring process and stepped down unexpectedly in July, citing family issues, although Vivienne Serret of The Independent Alligator reported that DeSantis allies on the Board of Trustees forced him out.

One of the biggest stories in the country these days is the corruption scandal in Ohio, in which dark money groups led by the FirstEnergy utility company worked with former Ohio House speaker Larry Householder to put into office politicians who, thanks to about $61 million in bribes, backed a $1.3 billion bailout for FirstEnergy paid for with tax dollars.

On Monday, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost agreed to settle the scandal. FirstEnergy will pay a $20 million fine, an amount that Marty Schladen of the Ohio Capital Journal notes is less than one-third the amount FirstEnergy spent to bribe legislators, and a fraction of the money ratepayers have had to pay because of the corrupt legislation the bribes paid for.

Nothing better illustrates the grift at the center of today’s MAGA Republicans than Donald Trump’s Big Lie that he actually won the 2020 election and that it was stolen from him by those dangerous “others,” the Democrats. The Big Lie enabled the Trump team to continue soliciting donations in order to fight for the White House. According to Conason, Trump and his fellow election deniers pocketed $255.4 million between the 2020 election and the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol to stop the counting of the electoral votes that would make Democratic candidate Joe Biden president.

On Monday, jurors found former Colorado election clerk Tina Peters guilty on seven counts in relation to her compromising of her county’s election system. Peters was determined to get voter information to My Pillow chief executive Mike Lindell, a key Trump ally, in order to prove the Big Lie. She is facing more than 22 years in prison.

[PsiPhiGrrrl]

@milliefink

Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost agreed to settle the scandal. FirstEnergy will pay a $20 million fine, an amount that Marty Schladen of the Ohio Capital Journal notes is less than one-third the amount FirstEnergy spent to bribe legislators, and a fraction of the money ratepayers have had to pay because of the corrupt legislation the bribes paid for.

This is why they do it. The penalties are always a fraction of the ill-gotten gains, and the ringleaders are never the ones to go to jail - only their minions serve time in prison.

[hecep]

@milliefink

She is facing more than 22 years in prison.

MT’s Michael Popok’s stern warning to MAGA election workers and clerks.

[milliefink]

August 17, 2024 (Saturday)

I am in Chicago for the Democratic National Convention, and don’t think it’s possible for anyone who has written as much as I have about political conventions not to want to dive into some past history of them even as modern history is being made. So I hope you’ll indulge me in a little historical spelunking as I write in the next few days.

But as eager as I am to see a convention in 3D for once after seeing so many on paper, I always hate to leave a Maine summer.

This picture is a friend’s view of the harbor at sunrise:

[milliefink]

August 18, 2024 (Sunday)

On August 18, 1920, the Tennessee legislature ratified the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution by a vote of 50 to 49. The deciding vote came from Harry T. Burn, who supported suffrage but was under pressure to vote no. His mother had urged him to vote yes despite the pressure. “I believe in full suffrage as a right,” he said. “I believe we had a moral and legal right to ratify. I know that a mother’s advice is always safest for her boy to follow, and my mother wanted me to vote for ratification.”

Tennessee was the 36th state to ratify the amendment, and the last one necessary to make the amendment the law of the land once the secretary of state certified it.

The new amendment was patterned on the Fifteenth Amendment, which protected the right of Black men to vote, and it read:

“The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

“Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

Like the momentum for the Fifteenth Amendment, the push for rights for women had taken root during the Civil War as women backed the United States armies with their money, buying bonds and paying taxes; with their loved ones, sending sons and husbands and fathers to the war front; with their labor, working in factories and fields and taking over from men in the nursing and teaching professions; and even with their lives, spying and fighting for the Union. In the aftermath of the war, as the divided nation was rebuilt, many of them expected they would have a say in how it was reconstructed.

But to their dismay, the Fourteenth Amendment explicitly tied the right to vote to “male” citizens, inserting the word “male” into the Constitution for the first time.

Boston abolitionist Julia Ward Howe, the author of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” was outraged. The laws of the era gave control of her property and her children to her abusive husband, and while far from a rabble-rouser, she wanted the right to adjust those laws so they were fair. In this moment, it seemed the right the Founders had articulated in the Declaration of Independence—the right to consent to the government under which one lived—was to be denied to the very women who had helped preserve the country, while white male Confederates and now Black men both enjoyed that right.

“The Civil War came to an end, leaving the slave not only emancipated, but endowed with the full dignity of citizenship. The women of the North had greatly helped to open the door which admitted him to freedom and its safeguard, the ballot. Was this door to be shut in their face?” Howe wondered.

The next year, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony formed the National Woman Suffrage Association, and six months later, Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe founded the American Woman Suffrage Association.

The National Woman Suffrage Association wanted a general reworking of gender roles in American society, drawing from the Seneca Falls Convention that Stanton had organized in 1848.

That convention’s Declaration of Sentiments, patterned explicitly on the Declaration of Independence, asserted that “all men and women are created equal” and that “the history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.” It listed the many ways in which men had “fraudulently deprived [women] of their most sacred rights” and insisted that women receive “immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of these United States.”

While the National Woman Suffrage Association excluded men from its membership, the American Woman Suffrage Association made a point of including men equally, as well as Black woman suffragists, to indicate that they were interested in the universal right to vote and only in that right, believing the rest of the rights their rivals demanded would come through voting.

The women’s suffrage movement had initial success in the western territories, both because lawmakers there were hoping to attract women for their male-heavy communities and because the same lawmakers were furious at the growing noise about Black voting. Wyoming Territory granted women the vote in 1869, and lawmakers in Utah Territory followed suit in 1870, expecting that women would vote against polygamy there. When women in fact supported polygamy, Utah lawmakers tried unsuccessfully to take their vote away, and the movement for women’s suffrage in the West slowed dramatically.

Suffragists had hoped that women would be included in the Fifteenth Amendment and, when they were not, decided to test their right to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment in the 1872 election. According to its statement that anyone born in the U.S. was a citizen, they were certainly citizens and thus should be able to vote. In New York state, Susan B. Anthony voted successfully but was later tried and convicted—in an all-male courtroom in which she did not have the right to testify—for the crime of voting.

In Missouri a voting registrar named Reese Happersett refused to permit suffragist Virginia Minor to register. Minor sued Happersett, and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court. In a unanimous decision in 1875, the justices decided that women were indeed citizens but that citizenship did not necessarily convey the right to vote.

This decision meant the fat was in the fire for Black Americans in the South, as it paved the way for white supremacists to keep them from the polls in 1876. But it was also a blow to suffragists, who recast their claims to voting by moving away from the idea that they had a human right to consent to their government, and toward the idea that they would be better and more principled voters than the Black men and immigrants who, under the law anyway, had the right to vote.

For the next two decades, the women’s suffrage movement drew its power from the many women’s organizations put together across the country by women of all races and backgrounds who came together to stop excessive drinking, clean up the sewage in city streets, protect children, stop lynching, and promote civil rights.

Black women like educator Mary Church Terrell and journalist Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, publisher of the Woman’s Era, brought a broad lens to the movement from their work for civil rights, but they could not miss that Black women stood in between the movements for Black rights and women’s rights, a position scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw would identify In the twentieth century as “intersectionality.”

In 1890 the two major suffrage associations merged into the National American Woman Suffrage Association and worked to change voting laws at the state level. Gradually, western states and territories permitted women to vote in certain elections until by 1920, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, Washington, California, Oregon, Arizona, Kansas, Alaska Territory, Montana, and Nevada recognized women’s right to vote in at least some elections.

Suffragists recognized that action at the federal level would be more effective than a state-by-state strategy. The day before Democratic president Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated in 1913, they organized a suffrage parade in Washington, D.C., that grabbed media attention. They continued civil disobedience to pressure Wilson into supporting their movement.

Still, it took another war effort, that of World War I, which the U.S. entered in 1917, to light a fire under the lawmakers whose votes would be necessary to get a suffrage amendment through Congress and send it off to the states for ratification. Wilson, finally on board as he faced a difficult midterm election in 1918, backed a constitutional amendment, asking congressmen: “Shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right?”

Congress passed the measure in a special session on June 4, 1919, and Tennessee’s ratification on August 18, 1920, made it the law of the land as soon as the official notice was in the hands of the secretary of state. Twenty-six million American women had the right to vote in the 1920 presidential election.

Crucially, as the Black suffragists had known all too well when they found themselves caught between the drives for Black male voting and women’s suffrage, Jim Crow and Juan Crow laws meant that most Black women and women of color would remain unable to vote for another 45 years. And yet they never stopped fighting for that right. Women like Fannie Lou Hamer, Amelia Boynton, Rosa Parks, Viola Liuzzo, and Constance Baker Motley were key organizers of voting rights initiatives, spreading information, arranging marches, sparking key protests, and preparing legal cases.

In 1980, women began to shift their votes to the Democrats, and in 1984 the Democrats nominated Representative Geraldine Ferraro of New York to run for vice president alongside presidential candidate Walter Mondale. Republicans followed suit in 2008 when they nominated Alaska governor Sarah Palin to run with Arizona senator John McCain. Still, it was not until 2016 that a major political party nominated a woman, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, for president. In 2020 the Democrats nominated California senator Kamala Harris for vice president, and when voters elected her and President Joe Biden, they made her the first female vice president of the United States.

Tonight, on the 104th anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, delegates are gathered in Chicago, Illinois, for the Democratic National Convention, where they will celebrate Harris’s nomination for the presidency.

It’s been a long time coming.

[DukeTrout]

@milliefink

It’s been a long time coming.

Fresh Tendrils

[milliefink]

August 19, 2024 (Monday)

The Democratic National Committee today released a platform that lays out the history of the last four years and explains how and why the Biden-Harris administration has oriented the United States government toward ordinary Americans. It is in many ways a snapshot of the United States of America in this moment. At the most basic level, it shows how rapidly the political world is changing. Approved on July 16, five days before President Joe Biden announced he would not accept the nomination, it refers to Biden, and not to Vice President Kamala Harris, as the party’s nominee.

At a grander scale, though, the platform suggests the country is entering a new political alignment. In its length and scope it recalls the 1980 Republican platform that launched the Reagan Revolution and the modern Republican Party. Unlike that platform, which laid out what the Republicans hoped to accomplish if voters put them into power, today’s Democratic platform recounts almost four years of work on which to base the Democrats’ future plans.

As the Republican Party that coalesced under Reagan has crumbled into a Christian nationalist authoritarianism, the Democrats have come together into a pro-democracy coalition. That coalition includes Republicans eager to stop Trump and his allies. They have signed on to elect Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota governor Tim Walz in order to preserve democracy, but are clear they are not embracing the Democratic Party’s policies. The Harris-Walz campaign has welcomed them.

The Republicans’ platform is heavy on slogans—many of which are in all caps—saying things like “We will defeat Inflation, tackle the cost-of-living crisis, improve fiscal sanity, restore price stability, and quickly bring down prices,” without any suggestion of how they will bring about such sweeping changes. In contrast, the Democrats laid out their policies today in a detailed 90-page platform that places the accomplishments of the Biden-Harris administration in a larger framework of protecting American democracy.

The platform lists the landmark legislation the Democrats have passed since 2021 and explains how they designed those measures to address both economic inequality and the historic racial and gender discrimination that has held back women as well as racial and gender minorities. The central theme of the platform is fairness: some version of that word appears in the document 58 times. The nation’s government, and the globe, have been skewed toward a few rich people. The Democratic platform says that they should pay their fair share and that those Americans who have been held back by systemic discrimination should have a fair shot at success.

“Our nation is at an inflection point,” the platform’s preamble reads. “What kind of America will we be? A land of more freedom, or less freedom? More rights or fewer? An economy rigged for the rich and powerful, or where everyone has a fair shot at getting ahead?” Taking office in the midst of a crisis, “Democrats proved once again that democracy can deliver, and made tremendous progress turning the country around,” but Trump will destroy those victories, focusing “not on opportunity and optimism, but on revenge and retribution…. He and his extreme MAGA allies are ripping away our bedrock personal freedoms, dictating what health care decisions women can make, banning books, and telling people who they can love. They’re rigging our economy for their rich friends and big corporations, pushing more trickle-down tax cuts for the wealthy and powerful…. They are eroding our democracy with lies and threats, have refused to denounce political violence, and are making it harder to vote. And given the chance, they’ll keep stacking our courts, locking in their extreme agenda for decades.”

“History has shown that nothing about democracy is guaranteed,” the platform reads. “Every generation has to protect it, preserve it, choose it. We must stand together to choose what we want America to be.”

The Democratic platform was the backdrop today for the opening of the Democratic National Convention at the United Center in Chicago, Illinois. Today’s theme was “For the People,” and today’s speakers hit that goal, aiming directly at voters by telling two compelling stories of America. While the evening was designed to honor President Joe Biden, it did that not so much by focusing on his administration’s achievements—although they were there—as by emphasizing how his qualities, his initiatives, and his faith in America have restored the nation’s better qualities, setting it on a positive path.

Speakers told a wide range of stories about the many kindnesses of Biden, Harris, and Walz. Representative Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) teared up when she recounted Harris’s kindness to her as a new lawmaker. Golden State Warriors and U.S. national basketball team coach Steve Kerr noted that Harris and Walz have spent their careers “serving other people.” Minnesota lieutenant governor Peggy Flanagan talked of how as Walz does the work for Minnesota, he brings along a “bottomless bag of snacks – Nutter Butters, cheese curds, and Diet Dew.”

Speakers talked about how the Democrats are getting things done: Representative Joyce Beatty (D-OH) said that “J.D. and Trump like to talk about states like Ohio, but Kamala and Joe actually get stuff done for us.” United Auto Workers union president Shawn Fain and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes (D-NY) emphasized the support of Biden, Harris, and Walz for unions and other working Americans, noting that they come from a middle-class background themselves.

And they talked about what patriotism means. Representative Robert Garcia (D-CA) said: “My mom taught me to love this country. She taught me that real American patriotism is not about screaming and yelling, ‘America first.’ Real American patriotism is loving your country so much that you want to help the people in your country. THAT is American patriotism.”

Senator Raphael Warnock (D-GA) brought the crowd to its feet when he offered the Democrats’ underlying moral doctrine: “I need my neighbor’s children to be okay so that my children will be okay,” he said. “I need all of my neighbor’s children to be okay, poor inner city children in Atlanta and poor children of Appalachia, I need the poor children of Israel and the poor children of Gaza, I need Israelis and Palestinians, I need those in the Congo, those in Haiti, those in Ukraine, I need American children on both sides of the track to be okay. Because we are all God’s children. And so let’s stand together. Let’s work together. Let’s organize together. Let’s pray together. Let’s stand together. Let’s heal the land.”

In contrast to this forward looking community vision, the speakers made clear—often with memorable humor—that the future Trump offers is as dark as his own vows of retribution and revenge. They spoke of how he cares only about himself and how Trump has vowed to be a dictator. Several people mentioned Project 2025, which South Carolina representative James Clyburn called “Jim Crow 2.0.”

Flanagan told the crowd that her brother was the second person in Tennessee to die of Covid; Garcia said his mother and stepfather both died of it. The DNC showed a video of Trump downplaying the disease. Individuals affected by the abortion bans enacted after the Supreme Court overturned the right to abortion care told their heart wrenching stories.

And they talked about Trump’s crimes. Representative Crockett asked voters which of the two candidates they would hire. “Kamala Harris has a résumé,” she said. “Donald Trump has a rap sheet.” Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) noted that Trump’s vice president Mike Pence is the first vice president in more than 200 years “not to support the president he served with in a general election.” “Someone should’ve told Donald Trump that the president’s job under Article 2 of the Constitution is to take care that the laws are faithfully executed, not that the vice president is executed…. J.D. Vance, do you understand why there was a sudden job opening for running mate on the [Republican] ticket? They tried to kill your predecessor!” Senator Laphonza Butler (D-CA) told the crowd: “We deserve a president…who shatters the boundaries of what’s possible, not the boundaries of what’s legal.”

The Democrats tonight wove the past into their story of the future, creating a new history in which the present moment is part of a longer trajectory. Civil rights leader Reverend Jesse L. Jackson Sr., who worked alongside the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr., received a standing ovation tonight. And when former secretary of state Hillary Clinton took the stage, the crowd roared.

“Something is happening in America,” she said. ”You can feel it. Something we’ve worked for and dreamed of for a long time.” She recalled the history of women’s suffrage in the United States, noting that her mother was born before the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, and she remembered the pathbreaking leadership of New York representative Shirley Chisholm, the first woman to run for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, and Representative Geraldine Ferraro, also of New York, who ran for vice president in 1984. Then she spoke of her own nomination for president in 2016: “Nearly 66 million Americans voted for a future where there are no ceilings on our dreams. And afterwards we refused to give up on America. Millions marched, many ran for office. We kept our eyes on the future.”

“Well, my friends,” she said, “the future is here!” She urged everyone to “keep going…. Kamala has the character, experience, and vision to lead us forward.”

When Biden took the stage at the end of the night, he was greeted with a long standing ovation and chants of “We love Joe!” He reiterated the deep importance of family and thanked his own before recounting the accomplishments of his administration in rebuilding the damaged country that he inherited in January 2021. And then he turned to democracy.

“The vote each of us casts this year will determine whether democracy and freedom will prevail. It’s that simple. It’s that serious,” he said. “And the power is literally in your hands. History is in your hands…. America’s future is in your hands.”

“Nowhere else in the world could a kid with a stutter and modest beginnings in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Claymont, Delaware, grow up to sit behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. That’s because America is and always has been a nation of possibilities. And we must never lose that.”

“Each of us has a part in the American story. For me and my family there’s a song that means a lot to us that captures the best of who we are as a nation. The song is called ‘American Anthem.’ There’s one verse that stands out….

“‘The work and prayers of centuries have brought us to this day.
What shall our legacy be? What will our children say?
Let me know in my heart when my days are through
America, America, I gave my best to you.’

“For 50 years…I have given my heart and soul to our nation. And I have been blessed a million times in return with the support of the American people…. I hope you know how grateful I am to all of you…. I can honestly say I’m more optimistic about the future than I was when I was elected as a 29-year-old United States senator.

“We just need to remember who we are.

“We’re the United States of America.

“And there is NOTHING we cannot do when we do it together.”

[docosc]

@milliefink

“I need my neighbor’s children to be okay so that my children will be okay,”

Amen and pass the voting registration forms! Get this quote on billboards and bumper stickers. This is the stuff that needs to be said!

[PsiPhiGrrrl]

@milliefink

they talked about Trump’s crimes. Representative Crockett asked voters which of the two candidates they would hire. “Kamala Harris has a résumé,” she said. “Donald Trump has a rap sheet.” Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) noted that Trump’s vice president Mike Pence is the first vice president in more than 200 years “not to support the president he served with in a general election.” “Someone should’ve told Donald Trump that the president’s job under Article 2 of the Constitution is to take care that the laws are faithfully executed, not that the vice president is executed

I want to see more messages like this from the DNC for voters who say they are concerned about law and order (apologies for the format):

Donald Trump Montage Plays at DNC

[gatto]

i liked the avenger’s style music at the end while every one is voting.

( still pretty amazing how ■■■■■’s words about sexually assaulting women are so offensive, they didn’t even quote him fully; but instead clipped the audio. )

[milliefink]

August 20, 2024 (Tuesday)

At Chicago’s United Center today, the delegates at the Democratic National Convention reaffirmed last week’s online nomination of Kamala Harris for president. The ceremonial roll-call vote featured all the usual good natured boasting from the delegates about their own state’s virtues, a process that reinforces the incredible diversity and history of both this land and its people. The managers reserved the final slots for Minnesota and California—the home states of Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz and presidential candidate Kamala Harris, respectively—to put the ticket over the top.

When the votes had been counted, Harris joined the crowd virtually from a rally she and Walz were holding at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Last month the Republicans held their own national convention in that venue, and for Harris to accept her nomination in the same place was an acknowledgement of how important Wisconsin will be in this election. But it also meant that Trump, who is obsessed with crowd sizes, would have to see not one but two packed sports arenas of supporters cheer wildly for her nomination.

He also had to contend with former loyalists and supporters joining the Democratic convention. His former press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, told the Democratic convention tonight that when the cameras are off, “Trump mocks his supporters. He calls them basement dwellers.” Grisham endorsed Harris, saying: “I love my country more than my party. Kamala Harris tells the truth. She respects the American people and she has my vote.”

Trump spoke glumly to a small crowd today at the Livingston County Sheriff’s Office in Howell, Michigan.

It was almost exactly twenty years ago, on July 27, 2004, that 43-year-old Illinois state senator Barack Obama, who was, at the time, running for a seat in the U.S. Senate, gave the keynote address to that year’s Democratic National Convention. It was the speech that began his rise to the presidency.

Like the Democrats who spoke last night, Obama talked in 2004 of his childhood and recalled how his parents had “faith in the possibilities of this nation.” And like Biden last night, Obama said that “in no other country on earth, is my story even possible.” The nation’s promise, he said, came from the human equality promised in the Declaration of Independence.

“That is the true genius of America,” Obama said, “a faith in the simple dreams of its people, the insistence on small miracles.” He called for an America “where hard work is rewarded.” “[I]t’s not enough for just some of us to prosper,” he said, “[f]or alongside our famous individualism, there’s another ingredient in the American saga.”

He described that ingredient as “[a]belief that we are connected as one people. If there’s a child on the south side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s not my child. If there’s a senior citizen somewhere who can’t pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it’s not my grandmother. If there’s an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It’s that fundamental belief—I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper—that makes this country work. It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family. ‘E pluribus unum.’ Out of many, one.”
Obama emphasized Americans’ shared values and pushed back against “those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes.” He reached back into history to prove that “the bedrock of this nation” is “the belief that there are better days ahead.” He called that belief “[t]he audacity of hope.”

Almost exactly twenty years after his 2004 speech, the same man, now a former president who served for eight years, spoke at tonight’s Democratic National Convention. But the past two decades have challenged his vision.

When voters put Obama into the White House in 2008, Republicans set out to make sure they couldn’t govern. Mitch McConnell (R–KY) became Senate minority leader in 2007 and, using the filibuster, stopped most Democratic measures by requiring 60 votes to move anything to a vote.

In 2010 the Supreme Court handed down the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, declaring that corporations and other outside groups could spend as much money as they wanted on elections. Citizens United increased Republican seats in legislative bodies, and in the 2010 midterm elections, Republicans packed state legislatures with their own candidates in time to be in charge of redistricting their states after the 2010 census. Republicans controlled the key states of Florida, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio, and Michigan, as well as other, smaller states, and after the election, they used precise computer models to win previously Democratic House seats.

In the 2012 election, Democrats won the White House decisively, the Senate easily, and
a majority of 1.4 million votes for House candidates. Yet Republicans came away with a thirty-three-seat majority in the House of Representatives. And then, with the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, making it harder to protect Democratic voters.

As the Republicans skewed the mechanics of government to favor themselves, their candidates no longer had to worry they would lose general elections but did have to worry about losing primaries to more extreme challengers. So they swung farther and farther to the right, demonizing the Democrats until finally those who remain Republicans have given up on democracy altogether.

Tonight’s speech echoed that of 2004 by saying that America’s “central story” is that “we are all created equal,” and describing Harris and Walz as hardworking people who would use the government to create a fair system. He sounded more concerned today than in 2004 about political divisions, and reminded the crowd: “The vast majority of us do not want to live in a country that’s bitter and divided,” he said. “We want something better. We want to be better. And the joy and the excitement that we’re seeing around this campaign tells us we’re not alone,” he said.

And then, in his praise for his grandmother, “a little old white lady born in a tiny town called Peru, Kansas,” and his mother-in-law, Marion Robinson, a Black woman from the South Side of Chicago, he brought a new emphasis on ordinary Americans, especially women, who work hard, sacrifice for their children, and value honesty, integrity, kindness, helping others, and hard work.
They wanted their children to “do things and go places that they would’ve never imagined for themselves.” “Whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican or somewhere in between,” he said, “we have all had people like that in our lives:… good hardworking people who weren’t famous or powerful but who managed in countless ways to leave this country just a little bit better than they found it.”

If President Obama emphasized tonight that the nation depends on the good will of ordinary people, it was his wife, former first lady Michelle Obama, who spoke with the voice of those people and made it clear that only the American people can preserve democracy.

In a truly extraordinary speech, perfectly delivered, Mrs. Obama described her mother as someone who lived out the idea of hope for a better future, working for children and the community. “She was glad to do the thankless, unglamorous work that for generations has strengthened the fabric of this nation,” Mrs. Obama said, “the belief that if you do unto others, if you love thy neighbor, if you work and scrape and sacrifice, it will pay off. If not for you, then maybe for your children or your grandchildren.”

Unlike her husband, though, Mrs. Obama called out Trump and his allies, who are trying to destroy that worldview. “No one has a monopoly on what it means to be an American,” she said. “No one.” “[M]ost of us will never be afforded the grace of failing forward,” she said. “We will never benefit from the affirmative action of generational wealth. If we bankrupt a business…or choke in a crisis, we don’t get a second, third, or fourth chance. If things don’t go our way, we don’t have the luxury of whining or cheating others to get further ahead…we don’t get to change the rules so we always win. If we see a mountain in front of us, we don’t expect there to be an escalator waiting to take us to the top. No, we put our heads down. We get to work. In America, we do something."

And then Mrs. Obama took up the mantle of her mother, warning that demonizing others and taking away their rights, “only makes us small.” It “demeans and cheapens our politics. It only serves to further discourage good, big-hearted people from wanting to get involved at all. America, our parents taught us better than that.”
It is “up to us to be the solution that we seek.” she said. She urged people to “be the antidote to the darkness and division.” “[W]hether you’re Democrat, Republican, Independent, or none of the above,” she said, “this is our time to stand up for what we know. In our hearts is right. Not just for our basic freedoms, but for decency and humanity, for basic respect. Dignity and empathy. For the values at the very foundation of this democracy.”

“Don’t just sit around and complain. Do something.”

[milliefink]

@milliefink

His former press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, told the Democratic convention tonight that when the cameras are off, “Trump mocks his supporters. He calls them basement dwellers.”

Sure would be great if some recordings of that got released.

(Not that it would likely help at all in convincing MAGAts that they’re being duped by a lowlife conman.)