There's a pretty active position among conservatives in the US that the feds/state/school shouldn't even provide food for students. I've been a school teacher for 23 years and worked in about a dozen different school systems. Not once have I seen or heard of boys using girls' restrooms, or vice versa. Just hasn't happened. In fact, I once worked in a district that brought in a row of porta toilets, and had them positioned in a courtyard in place of one student restroom that went offline for a while. Lots of Americans remain pretty prudish in their opinions about managing bodily functions in public places. Separate restrooms are still required. I'd also agree with the notion that understanding or simply acknowledging menstruation remains largely viewed as some kind of doorway to sexuality (or, sexualization to conservatives), so it's still judged harshly quite a bit, and therefore providing sanitary products is viewed as tacitly promoting sexuality.
No need to get judgy about American schools being unwilling to have shared restrooms even when one is out of order, given the huge visible gaps in the stalls of almost all cubicles. seriously, the only thing protecting your modesty is the custom of averting one’s eyes—the gaps around the doors and various other component parts can be nearly two inches wide, and it’s harder NOT to see someone than it is to see them. I’m pretty sure the high school girls would choose to “hold it” en masse till their bladders burst rather than risk their male classmates walking past a closed cubicle with them half naked inside. These are not the private havens you are imagining…
I'm not being judgy about schools being unwilling to have shared restrooms. I'm being a little judgy about American prudishness, because I believe a lot of it is disingenuous. It's an architectural/construction issue more than anything. If you've ever showered in an American truck stop you can imagine at least one possible solution of a bank/row of individual unisex restrooms in schools.
Good news for Harris, bad news for the other person, The Financial Times is now saying Harris is polling ahead of Trump when it comes to the Economy. It might seem small, 41 to 40 for Harris, but it is a seven point jump for Harris compared to where Biden was before he dropped out. Essentially, the Harris plan does not differ from Biden. I think the difference is her enthusiasm.
Not only that, Tr*mp now claims that the Harris/Walz campaign is "A.I.-ing" crowds at her stops and events -- his claim is that across the board, nobody is actually there.
I'm being a little judgy about American prudishness, because I believe a lot of it is disingenuous. It's an architectural/construction issue more than anything. If you've ever showered in an American truck stop you can imagine at least one possible solution of a bank/row of individual unisex restrooms in schools.
Actual separate toilets with real walls costs significant money - both in construction, and in ongoing costs for cleaning etc. On the other hand, toilet cubicals built the way they are typically found in Europe (with an overlap between the door and the cubical wall, so there isn't a big old vertical gap) cost about the same as the standard US construction. I don't know if there's a reason beyond "this is what we've always done" for US toilets to use the vertical gap construction rather than an arrangement that gives even the semblance of privacy.
It doesn't have to be done all at once. And in some places it's already been done. I was in airport bathrooms in LA, Boston and Newark last month -- no gaps in any of the stalls.
Our Senior Center has two unisex bathrooms. They are like regular ones, a small room enclosed with a regular door. Signs say Restrooms. Coming out of the bathroom one day I found a man waiting to use it. He looked surprised and asked if it was the ladies room. When I replied no it is for everyone. He looked shocked and said, " In a public place, who had that dumb idea?" and walked away.
Our post quake public buildings have a waiting area and unisex cubicles. I once saw an elderly woman being assisted by a man I presumed to be her husband and realised that under the old system of separate male or female toilets this would have been less likely to happen.
I also remembered visiting a friend in hospital many years ago and using the cubicle labelled Men simply because the queue outside the one labelled Women was too long and my need was urgent.
Not only that, Tr*mp now claims that the Harris/Walz campaign is "A.I.-ing" crowds at her stops and events -- his claim is that across the board, nobody is actually there.
I saw something on Mastodon last night that said some of his followers are starting to push back on stuff like this, telling him to stick to the issues so he doesn't lose. FWIW. Which ain't much.
Not only that, Tr*mp now claims that the Harris/Walz campaign is "A.I.-ing" crowds at her stops and events -- his claim is that across the board, nobody is actually there.
I saw something on Mastodon last night that said some of his followers are starting to push back on stuff like this, telling him to stick to the issues so he doesn't lose. FWIW. Which ain't much.
I imagine those wayward followers are going to be labeled RINOs, "losers," and summarily bounced from the goose-stepping ranks of MAGA.
Former President Donald Trump’s campaign flew in a blue Gulfstream jet formerly owned by sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, using it to travel to several campaign fundraisers over the weekend, the Miami Herald has confirmed.
Trump, enroute on his own private plane to a campaign event in Bozeman, Montana last week, unexpectedly landed in Billings because of mechanical problems, a campaign spokeswoman said. He and part of his staff then flew on a small charter to Bozeman for a rally Friday night. The next day, he switched to another larger Gulfstream with a serial number that matches a plane once owned by Epstein, his former neighbor in Palm Beach, the campaign confirmed.
So Donald Trump is apparently flying to campaign events on the Lolita Express.
So Donald Trump is apparently flying to campaign events on the Lolita Express.
Unless you think that all of Epstein's property should be destroyed as irredeemably tainted with paedophilia and sexual exploitation, then presumably other people are going to use the things that he has used.
It's true; and yet, there are hobbyists who do nothing but track individual airplanes and where they go, and then yak about it on social media. A decent campaign staff would be aware of this.
Unless you think that all of Epstein's property should be destroyed as irredeemably tainted with paedophilia and sexual exploitation, then presumably other people are going to use the things that he has used.
True, but if I were in Trump's position I wouldn't be keen to remind voters of a connection with the late Mr Epstein.
So Donald Trump is apparently flying to campaign events on the Lolita Express.
Unless you think that all of Epstein's property should be destroyed as irredeemably tainted with paedophilia and sexual exploitation, then presumably other people are going to use the things that he has used.
True fact: One of Hugh Hefner's planes got sold to Robert Mugabe. Not sure if ol' Bob was living the Playboy lifestyle, but it's safe to say his citizens sure as hell weren't.
Most of the lies I saw there were more along the lines of "We're very close to a world war" or "the stock market crashed last week" then to "Kamala Harris was convicted of shoplifting five times." IOW fanciful interpretations of facts, rather than outright fabrication of facts.
And anyway, no one any longer cares about whether Trump personally lies. Or whether he's
guilty of sexual assault.
Or whether his niece thinks he's a sociopath. All the outrage that could be milked from his toxic persona was squeezed out long ago. Since Dobbs, voter anxiety has been directed around GOP policy to regulate private life, not the personal shortcomings of the party leadership.
Yesterday, on NPR's 1A program, they were talking about how Christian Nationalism is trying to affect this election. It is a 31-minute listen.
About halfway through, they interviewed a writer from The Atlantic who collected the prayers that were being used at the beginning of Trump rallies. He noted, out of the 58 prayers he had collected, Trump was mentioned 87 times while Jesus Christ was mentioned 57 times. More often than not, the person giving the prayer would be a conservative pastor who would give thanks to God for choosing Trump, a righteous person. In 2020 Trump was often considered a flawed person chosen by God; but now he is righteous. Just think what it will be like if he tries to run the next time--highly unlikely, I grant you.
The discussion moved on to what would happen to these "Christians" if Trump loses this time. The response was they would initially reject the outcome of the election, but eventually, they would argue they are playing the long game. If not this time, they will have other chances.
On a later show, can't remember which one, there was mention of several Christian groups who are forming to support Harris, who is a committed Baptist herself.
I like the fact that Harris and Walz are presenting a different model of the Christian faith.
And anyway, no one any longer cares about whether Trump personally lies. Or whether he's
guilty of sexual assault.
Or whether his niece thinks he's a sociopath. All the outrage that could be milked from his toxic persona was squeezed out long ago. Since Dobbs, voter anxiety has been directed around GOP policy to regulate private life, not the personal shortcomings of the party leadership.
It's interesting that for many people character no longer matters when it comes to the presidency. I remember the American religious right making a big deal about how important the president's character was during the Great Penis Hunt of 1998. Now it's ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
At any rate, Elon Musk "interviewed" Trump on Xitter yesterday, and it went about as well as you would expect, with a forty minute delay due to technical difficulties followed by two hours of two insufferable men rattling on about how great they each are. Musk is not a trained interviewer so his contribution was to occasionally agree with whatever Trump said. Trump himself sounded, in the words of one analyst, like "what happens when you give Daffy Duck Speed and force him to watch 24 hours of Hitler Speeches". Naturally the New York Times was available to tidy that all up for their account [ paywall ] of the interview.
This is probably not welcome news for the Trump campaign
Arizona's ballot will include a major reproductive rights measure this fall alongside the presidential, Senate and other battleground races, putting a key issue directly before voters in the swing state.
JP Martin, the deputy communications officer for the Arizona secretary of state's office, told NBC News on Monday evening that the Arizona for Abortion Access Act will go before voters this election cycle, after organizers shattered the record for the number of valid signatures gathered for a ballot initiative in the state.
The secretary of state's office estimates that 577,971 valid signatures were turned in by Arizona for Abortion Access, a coalition of reproductive rights organizations that includes the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona and Planned Parenthood Advocates of Arizona. The signature haul far surpassed the 383,923 signatures required to make it onto the ballot. The Arizona for Abortion Access Act will go before voters under the title "Proposition 139."
The fact that so many signatures were gathered indicates that pro-choice referendums continue to popular and motivate voter turnout. We saw this in Ohio in 2023, and pretty much everywhere that's had such a referendum on the ballot since Dobbs.
Having such a measure on the ballot in a swing state is probably worth a percentage point or two of popular vote, and those aren't points the Republicans can afford to lose.
The Trump campaign email hack I mentioned recently seems to be a bit more complicated than I originally thought. The Washington Post and New York Times have both confirmed that they were approached by the hacker (or someone who got emails from the hacker), so whoever this is is shopping the data around pretty extensively. No one has yet published anything in full or anything other than very broad descriptions of what is contained, which is a huge departure from accepted media ethics in 2016, or even just last year if you want to count Hunter Biden's laptop.
What makes this especially interesting is that the Trump campaign has not reported this hacking to the FBI (as of August 11). Security blogger Marcie Wheeler speculates as to why that might be so.
On Thursday, The Washington Post was also sent a 271-page document about Vance from a sender who called himself Robert and used an AOL email account. Dated Feb. 23 and labeled “privileged & confidential,” the document highlighted potential political vulnerabilities for the first-term senator. Two people familiar with the document confirmed it was authentic and was commissioned by the campaign from Brand Woodward, a law firm that represents a number of prominent Trump advisers in investigations by state and federal authorities.
The document drew from publicly available information, including past news reports and interviews with the senator. The campaign commissioned several reports of other candidates, too, the advisers said.
The sender would not speak on the telephone with a Post reporter but indicated they had access to additional information, including internal campaign emails and documents related to Trump’s court cases. [my emphasis]
First, Brand Woodward did the campaign’s vetting.
Stan Woodward represents, along with others, Walt Nauta, Kash Patel, and Peter Navarro in various Trump-related criminal investigations, as well as some seditionists. He’s a great fit for Trump insofar as he’s good at generating outrage over manufactured slights — though in front of regular judges, those complaints usually collapse. Multiple filings in the documents case suggest that Woodward has a tenuous relationship with digital technology.
<snip>
There were better choices to vet candidates, but if Trump wants to let a thin team vet the surly troll he picked to be his running mate, that’s his own business.
My alarm about the news that Brand Woodward starts, however, by the way that the Trump campaign has muddled various functions, criminal and civil defense with campaign finance and, now, candidate vetting. It creates a legal morass, one that — if Trump loses this election — could lead to more legal trouble down the road.
Maybe that’s why Trump didn’t call the FBI.
But it also means that some people — most notably, Susie Wiles and Boris Epshteyn, along with Woodward and Brand — are playing multiple functions. Wiles is the one who decides who gets their criminal defense bills paid, she’s also the one who decides how to spend campaign cash, and she was a big backer of the JD pick.
When people play overlapping functions like that, it means that a hack targeted at them for one function — say, candidate vetting — may strike a gold mine of documents pertaining to another function — say, criminal defense.
WaPo’s reference to “documents related to Trump’s court cases” — Politico quoted the persona offering a “variety of documents from [Trump’s] legal and court documents to internal campaign discussions” — may ultimately pertain exclusively to Trump’s electoral court cases. If it does, those could be some of the most newsworthy out there, since Trump’s electoral court cases pose a direct threat to democracy.
But what if they don’t? What if these documents pertain to what those overlap people — people like Wiles or Epshteyn, and they’re only two of the most obvious – know about Trump’s criminal cases? What if they pertain to claims that witnesses have made to the FBI about where documents got moved or what was included in them? What if they pertain to the actual documents Trump stole, starting with the US strategic plan against Iran that Trump shared with Mark Meadows’ ghost writers?
Trump has not firewalled his campaign from a criminal case involving the most sensitive documents of the US government, meaning a well-executed hack targeted at his campaign may turn into an intelligence bonanza.
This is getting into "why don't the mafia call the police if someone robs them?" territory. We know that Trump mixes the people doing his campaign stuff with the people doing his criminal defense stuff, so a hack that penetrates the campaign email servers could very well score things related to Trump's alleged crimes and his planned legal defenses of same. It's distinctly possible that Trump hasn't reported this to the FBI, which would involve giving the FBI a forensic image of the compromised server(s), because the Justice Department is prosecuting Mr. Trump and this would be like handing over an unknown amount of his defense attorney's privileged material.
Funny, when wikileaks released H Clinton's emails back in 2016, the media was like a pack of wolves going after a fresh kill. When someone with access to Trump's documents this year sends them to media, no one wants to touch them.
@Crœsos I think the suggestion that Trump and his campaign have not called the FBI for the same reason that the Mafia would not report a robbery is accurate. The simile is also very apt.
Here's the thing though, as I understand it, if these are third party servers and the FBI has enough for probable cause, they can get a warrant and access to these files.
There are lawyers around who will correct me but I think this is right.
If the FBI carried out the hack, it would be an illegal search. But if evidence from the hack got to them without them soliciting it in any way (I.e. someone published it) then they can use that to get a warrant without running into fruit of the poison tree issues.
Well, I would like to hear how she responds to inflation, her plans for immigration and some of the Republican criticisms leveled against her ticket.
I have heard the stump speech several times (with some variation), I would like the press to ask her what she means on several points like what she plans to do for middle and working class families or how she wants to reform the tax system.
As these days I am a concerned US news junkie (because unfortunately US News often affects the world) I have been fascinated in a rhetorical shift about which I don't think I'm entirely mistaken.
You see either last election or maybe that dreadful day four years ealier, a few months after some Orange Humanoid (of whom I'd never heard*) rode a hideous golden escalator into an obscenely ugly atrium, all the rhetoric seemed to be about something called "middle class" America (or Americans).
This surprised me at the time, a) because I thought in general USAians didn't speak about class much, and b) because in my antipodean world it is the middle classes (moi) who were generally seen as bloated exploiters of the proletariat. It was and is the "working class" who were juggling mortgages, credit cards and loan sharks, who were generally seen to be neglected by bloated milldle class politicuans and bureaucrats. By memory Bernie Sanders used to make pleas for the workers, but few others (and A O-C wasn't on my radar of course until after the 2020 election).
Yet this cycle the phrase "working class" is frequently on lips and pixels. (occasionally lumped with "middle class" but generally not).
Have I dreamed this? Has there been a shift - in language, in awareness (perhaps related to Black Lives Matter?), in political speeach generally?
*I think Lou Reed referred to him once in a satirical song in which he [?]sang[?] "my good friend Donald said to me ..." ("Last Great American Whale")
I'd say we usually talk and pretend to care about the working class around elections, albeit no other time. I think it is more than 4 years ago, but it's a regular thing to pretend to give a shit about.
There's a story I tell a lot about presidential elections. Back in 2000, my first year of college, my favorite professor assigned our Intro to American Government class the assignment of predicting the outcome of the election. It was a big lecture class of ~80 students. We were all assigned states, bigger states were group projects. We each gave a presentation.
And what we learned was that, yes, we could predict the outcome. We knew it would come down to Ohio and Florida, and that it would be a squeaker, which it was.
This can be done because a lot of American states are predictable, and so pundits and politicos tend to focus on a small number of "swing states" that look like they're up for grabs. This time around, a good chunk of them are what used to be solid "blue" territory in the upper midwest, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania in particular. All of these are states that carry what is called a "rust belt" mythology where back in my parents' and grandparents' day, they were very strong democratic states because their elections were dominated by labor unions who all worked at factories.
Between my parents' generation and mine, those unions faltered as the factories failed. And so these states, once referred to as a "blue wall" seem to be crumbling and the GOP has spent a lot of resources trying to turn them around.
Phrases like "blue collar" and "working class" in American hearken back to the culture where, as an acquaintance put it, even a high school dropout could walk into a local factory and get a good-paying union job. It's a culture that a lot of people of a certain complexion and age still dream of. And because of this, both parties like to pander to that dream, either feeding their pride or offering to rebuild it with technology.
It's an old story in the US, one that waxes and wanes with each cycle. I think it also relates to the general kvetching about the cost of things. People want the sense of economic stability that went with the old factory culture and both parties keep saying they're going to bring it back.
And it makes me sad because I don't think anyone can. The world has moved on. We need new dreams. But, as a democrat and an American, we also need to win those states and, in an election, if that's what it takes...you do what you need to do to win.
There's a story I tell a lot about presidential elections. Back in 2000, my first year of college, my favorite professor assigned our Intro to American Government class the assignment of predicting the outcome of the election. It was a big lecture class of ~80 students. We were all assigned states, bigger states were group projects. We each gave a presentation.
And what we learned was that, yes, we could predict the outcome. We knew it would come down to Ohio and Florida, and that it would be a squeaker, which it was.
This can be done because a lot of American states are predictable, and so pundits and politicos tend to focus on a small number of "swing states" that look like they're up for grabs. This time around, a good chunk of them are what used to be solid "blue" territory in the upper midwest, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania in particular. All of these are states that carry what is called a "rust belt" mythology where back in my parents' and grandparents' day, they were very strong democratic states because their elections were dominated by labor unions who all worked at factories.
Between my parents' generation and mine, those unions faltered as the factories failed. And so these states, once referred to as a "blue wall" seem to be crumbling and the GOP has spent a lot of resources trying to turn them around.
Phrases like "blue collar" and "working class" in American hearken back to the culture where, as an acquaintance put it, even a high school dropout could walk into a local factory and get a good-paying union job. It's a culture that a lot of people of a certain complexion and age still dream of. And because of this, both parties like to pander to that dream, either feeding their pride or offering to rebuild it with technology.
It's an old story in the US, one that waxes and wanes with each cycle. I think it also relates to the general kvetching about the cost of things. People want the sense of economic stability that went with the old factory culture and both parties keep saying they're going to bring it back.
And it makes me sad because I don't think anyone can. The world has moved on. We need new dreams. But, as a democrat and an American, we also need to win those states and, in an election, if that's what it takes...you do what you need to do to win.
Re “ in an election, if that's what it takes...you do what you need to do to win,” I would prefer my candidates to tell the truth. (Of course, Harris and Walz may truly believe they can, and be honest about that, even if no one actually can, as you say.)
Here are some statistics from the World Economic Forum that looks at the changes of the three major economic classes in the United States from 1970 to 2021. N
Note, the middle class went from 61% of the population to 50%, Where did the 11% go. A few made it into the upper class, but most dropped down to the working class. Middle class kids are often saddled with student loan debt that really will not go away for a very long time.
Working class young adults who do want to go to college will get grants that do not have to be paid back.
Middle class retirees are having to return to work. Most of them drew down their 401ks especially during the pandemic because they could not adjust their style of living quickly enough. Many could not afford paying into retirement accounts because of heavy credit card debt. Even though the prices of many products have increased over the years, income levels of the middle class stayed relatively flat.
The good thing about Bidens recovery acts are union type wages are increasing. One of the local unions in our area is advertising for new construction workers. They can earn good money while learning skills that are in high demand.
This should continue during the Harris Administration. On the other hand, if Trump gets in, he barks a lot, but he will not likely deliver.
Between my parents' generation and mine, those unions faltered as the factories failed. And so these states, once referred to as a "blue wall" seem to be crumbling and the GOP has spent a lot of resources trying to turn them around.
Phrases like "blue collar" and "working class" in American hearken back to the culture where, as an acquaintance put it, even a high school dropout could walk into a local factory and get a good-paying union job. It's a culture that a lot of people of a certain complexion and age still dream of. And because of this, both parties like to pander to that dream, either feeding their pride or offering to rebuild it with technology.
It's an old story in the US, one that waxes and wanes with each cycle. I think it also relates to the general kvetching about the cost of things. People want the sense of economic stability that went with the old factory culture and both parties keep saying they're going to bring it back.
And it makes me sad because I don't think anyone can. The world has moved on. We need new dreams. But, as a democrat and an American, we also need to win those states and, in an election, if that's what it takes...you do what you need to do to win.
I think this illustrates one of the big historical misconceptions most Americans have about manufacturing labor. For most of their existence factory jobs were not "good jobs" in any sense of the term. In the early 20th century a steel worker would earn around 16¢/hour working an 84 hour week. (In inflation adjusted terms this is less than $3/hour.) That's seven 12 hour shifts per week. And then there was the infamous changeover shift, where the steel mill would switch the day shift workers with the night shift workers by requiring one of those shifts to work a 24 hour shift! What finally made this kind of labor into good jobs is unions forcing the companies to pay good wages for a reasonable amount of work, something @Bullfrog briefly touched on. In other words it's not "the old factory culture" that provided good jobs, it was unionization. There's nothing inherent about factory work that makes it a better job than any other, just a series of historically contingent factors that made that sector highly unionized in the mid-20th century.
In other words a more effective step to restoring a situation where "even a high school dropout could walk into a local [ employer ] and get a good-paying union job" is not restoring heavy industry, it's encouraging unionization wherever possible. The Biden administration has been particularly good about this, and Harris seems on board with continuing this. Like all recent Republican presidents, Trump is very hostile to labor unions.
tl;dr - it wasn't the factories, it was the unions.
TBF large employers with lots of workers on a single site, most of whom are doing comparable work, are a lot easier ground for unionisation than multi-site employers who can play wac-a-mole and divide-and-rule games.
Well, I would like to hear how she responds to inflation, her plans for immigration and some of the Republican criticisms leveled against her ticket.
I have heard the stump speech several times (with some variation), I would like the press to ask her what she means on several points like what she plans to do for middle and working class families or how she wants to reform the tax system.
I came across an interesting Xitter thread the other day about how the current American political press is singularly ill equipped to perform any of the functions @Gramps49 expects it to. Those who have Xitter accounts can pick up the start of the thread here. For those who are not on Xitter a text transcript can be found here. An excerpt:
1. The first thing you need to know about the vice president’s approach to the Washington press corps is look how well she’s doing as a result. Kamala Harris is now leading Donald Trump in some national polling averages as well as in some swing-state polls.
2. True, her lead is within the margin of error in most cases, but that’s an improvement from where the Democrats were before Joe Biden dropped out of the running and orchestrated instantaneous unification around his second-in-command.
3. I don’t think I’m overstating things. Her lead, the millions she’s bringing in, the thousands who are signing up to help, the big big mo’ – I think all of it comes directly from her campaign’s decision not to give the press corps too much access too fast.
4. I think that decision comes directly from the fact that Harris saw firsthand what the press corps did to Joe Biden’s campaign.
<snip>
8. Even if I agreed that candidates who want to be president should be regularly subjected to media scrutiny, I don’t think this press corps, as it is currently organized, is able to.
9. There are exceptions, of course, but this press corps is generally not equipped to scrutinize candidates on matters of fact and substance. I say this because this press corps has conspicuously traded matters of fact and substance for vibes.
10. It didn’t matter what Joe Biden did – pull the country out of a pandemic, dodge a recession, tame inflation, grow jobs, revive every single one of the “left behind” counties that voted for Trump in 2016 because of “economic anxiety” – it *didn’t matter* what Joe Biden did.
11. The press corps decided nothing was more important than his age, and lo! 2024 became an election about vibes and vibes ended his candidacy.
12. Vibes are this press corps’ forte, not fact and substance. If fact and substance were its strength, there would have been a different reaction to The Disaster Debate during which Biden talked about policy and issues while Trump didn’t bother.
13. Trump was incoherent and false, but he came off as confident and strong, and he came off as that way, because the press corps’ forte isn’t fact and substance.
14. If fact and substance were important, there would also have been a different reaction to Biden’s NATO press conference last month. He did it after the Disaster Debate to show he still had what it takes. He talked for an hour about foreign affairs, international laws and war.
15. But this press corps didn’t hear any of that after Biden said “Vice President Trump” by mistake. There’s no grace for the old in Washington, nor is there interest in anything but vibes in the Washington press corps.
I recommend reading the whole thing. While it's long by Xitter thread standards (35 posts), by regular people standards it's not that long.
Kamala Harris has a fairly long public record. More importantly she's the current vice president, so unless she's made some statement distancing herself from the rest of the Biden administration it's fairly safe to assume (and the public is assuming) that her policy preferences are pretty close to those of Joe Biden. We've had three and a half years to see what that looks like. A Harris policy agenda is something along the lines of (in no particular order):
Federal legislation to protect abortion rights nationwide
Support for labor unions
Industrial policy along the lines of the CHIPS Act and the IRA, with special attention to green technology
Support for the rights of LGBTQ+ Americans
Continued support for Ukraine's military resistance to the Russian invasion
A path to citizenship for some immigrants, especially those covered by the DREAM Act, plus increased border security
Supreme Court ethics reform
Appointing cabinet members competent to carry out all of the above
That's just off the top of my head and I may have missed some, but that's a general outline. Now there may be some differences in priority between Biden and Harris, but those differences are trivially small when compared with the yawning chasm between the list above and the policy agenda advocated by Donald Trump, the only other plausible candidate for president this election. Trump's agenda (also a well known quantity from his four years in office) is pretty much the opposite of everything on the list above (except for the increased border security), and if you haven't gotten that by now I don't know how much good a press conference is going to be getting you to wrap your head around those differences.
The main reason the press corps is agitating for a press conference is that Harris is (so far) doing very well without them and they resent that. I'm hoping this represents a change from the usual Democratic relationship with the press, of regarding it as a necessary gatekeeper, to regarding the press as one of many ways of getting your message in front of the public. It's the difference between using your social media account to whine "why won't the press point out what weirdos these guys are?" and using your social media to say "hey, look at these weirdos!"
Well, I would like to hear how she responds to inflation, her plans for immigration and some of the Republican criticisms leveled against her ticket.
I have heard the stump speech several times (with some variation), I would like the press to ask her what she means on several points like what she plans to do for middle and working class families or how she wants to reform the tax system.
As these days I am a concerned US news junkie (because unfortunately US News often affects the world) I have been fascinated in a rhetorical shift about which I don't think I'm entirely mistaken.
You see either last election or maybe that dreadful day four years ealier, a few months after some Orange Humanoid (of whom I'd never heard*) rode a hideous golden escalator into an obscenely ugly atrium, all the rhetoric seemed to be about something called "middle class" America (or Americans).
This surprised me at the time, a) because I thought in general USAians didn't speak about class much, and b) because in my antipodean world it is the middle classes (moi) who were generally seen as bloated exploiters of the proletariat. It was and is the "working class" who were juggling mortgages, credit cards and loan sharks, who were generally seen to be neglected by bloated milldle class politicuans and bureaucrats. By memory Bernie Sanders used to make pleas for the workers, but few others (and A O-C wasn't on my radar of course until after the 2020 election).
Yet this cycle the phrase "working class" is frequently on lips and pixels. (occasionally lumped with "middle class" but generally not).
Have I dreamed this? Has there been a shift - in language, in awareness (perhaps related to Black Lives Matter?), in political speeach generally?
*I think Lou Reed referred to him once in a satirical song in which he [?]sang[?] "my good friend Donald said to me ..." ("Last Great American Whale")
I think in the UK, the term “middle class” still has its older meaning of someone who owns a business (including small businesses like shops), someone educated in a profession like medicine, law, architecture, etc, or someone who works in management.
In the US, being middle class in non-academic conversational language just means being average, neither rich nor poor, no matter what you own or what kind of job you do, so most people identify as middle class if all you ask them is “Are you middle class?”, even if many of the same people would say they are working class instead of middle class if you gave them more options.
Trump came out with more Joe Biden fan fiction yesterday (August 14). This was in the form of tone poem recited in front of a small gathering of his supporters in a North Carolina auditorium.
Let them have their convention, and who knows how that’s going to turn out?
Joe Biden is a very angry man, they took it away from him, they usurped it, they took it away from him, terrible terrible.
I’m not sure they picked the right guy in him but he got 14 million votes — he got 14 million votes,
she got no votes and you look at what happens, that’s not the way it was supposed to happen.
They’re a threat to democracy, right?
As they say.
Previous installments of Donald Trump's fan fiction can be found here and here.
If you think that is odd, consider that he said it during what his campaign officials assured everybody would be a major economic address. Do you see anything about the economy in those comments? And, hey, wasn't that Cary Grant a handsome guy? San Francisco is such a vile place...
It is no wonder that the Republicans are pushing Vance to every event they can think of. It beats allowing their candidate for President of the USA to ever open his mouth in public.
And, in his explanation of why he is "entitled" to make personal attacks on Harris, he unleashed this whopper: "Kamala Harris . . . broke the world, frankly." Which, if it were true, would mean that Harris has done more as Vice President than any Vice President in history! How is she going to top that as President? Break the solar system? The galaxy? The multiverse?
At one point, as Trump talked about the 2020 election he lost, he noticed a box of cereal.
“I haven’t seen Cheerios in a long time,” Trump said. “I’m going to take them back to my cottage.”
As he turned to walk back inside, Trump did not respond to shouted questions about when he last went grocery shopping.
Yes. As he was on his favorite hobbyhorse of griping about the 2020 election, he got himself distracted by a box of Cheerios--apparently not having seen one in a long time.
Did Trump have a press conference yesterday? My understanding is that he made a speech to his followers in front of his home and tricked the press into attending by calling it a press conference.
I suppose "tricked" may be assuming too much when it comes to the press corps.
It kind of reminded me of his weird "press conference" from 2016 where he showcased a bunch of Trump-branded products (Trump steaks, Trump wine, Trump water, etc.)
As a narcissistic populist, Tr*mp is in constant need of the specific kind of attention that validates his voracious need for relevance. He'll never stop obsessing over crowd size because he can't. And everything he says will always press-worthy in his mind, because to him it has to be. I'm not saying for a second that I feel sorry for him, but it is more and more difficult to watch the longer it goes on.
Comments
I'm not being judgy about schools being unwilling to have shared restrooms. I'm being a little judgy about American prudishness, because I believe a lot of it is disingenuous. It's an architectural/construction issue more than anything. If you've ever showered in an American truck stop you can imagine at least one possible solution of a bank/row of individual unisex restrooms in schools.
1000%
Walz is now going solo on the campaign trial.
Trump still insisting he has larger crowd sizes.
Actual separate toilets with real walls costs significant money - both in construction, and in ongoing costs for cleaning etc. On the other hand, toilet cubicals built the way they are typically found in Europe (with an overlap between the door and the cubical wall, so there isn't a big old vertical gap) cost about the same as the standard US construction. I don't know if there's a reason beyond "this is what we've always done" for US toilets to use the vertical gap construction rather than an arrangement that gives even the semblance of privacy.
I also remembered visiting a friend in hospital many years ago and using the cubicle labelled Men simply because the queue outside the one labelled Women was too long and my need was urgent.
I saw something on Mastodon last night that said some of his followers are starting to push back on stuff like this, telling him to stick to the issues so he doesn't lose. FWIW. Which ain't much.
I imagine those wayward followers are going to be labeled RINOs, "losers," and summarily bounced from the goose-stepping ranks of MAGA.
So Donald Trump is apparently flying to campaign events on the Lolita Express.
Unless you think that all of Epstein's property should be destroyed as irredeemably tainted with paedophilia and sexual exploitation, then presumably other people are going to use the things that he has used.
True, but if I were in Trump's position I wouldn't be keen to remind voters of a connection with the late Mr Epstein.
True fact: One of Hugh Hefner's planes got sold to Robert Mugabe. Not sure if ol' Bob was living the Playboy lifestyle, but it's safe to say his citizens sure as hell weren't.
Hint: Initials are allegedly JDV
It could at least be done in new construction.
Feel free to choose your favourites from the 162 lies they identified:
https://www.npr.org/2024/08/11/nx-s1-5070566/trump-news-conference
Most of the lies I saw there were more along the lines of "We're very close to a world war" or "the stock market crashed last week" then to "Kamala Harris was convicted of shoplifting five times." IOW fanciful interpretations of facts, rather than outright fabrication of facts.
And anyway, no one any longer cares about whether Trump personally lies. Or whether he's
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0jpn2q76n1o
Does he himself believe this stuff? Delusional or what?
About halfway through, they interviewed a writer from The Atlantic who collected the prayers that were being used at the beginning of Trump rallies. He noted, out of the 58 prayers he had collected, Trump was mentioned 87 times while Jesus Christ was mentioned 57 times. More often than not, the person giving the prayer would be a conservative pastor who would give thanks to God for choosing Trump, a righteous person. In 2020 Trump was often considered a flawed person chosen by God; but now he is righteous. Just think what it will be like if he tries to run the next time--highly unlikely, I grant you.
The discussion moved on to what would happen to these "Christians" if Trump loses this time. The response was they would initially reject the outcome of the election, but eventually, they would argue they are playing the long game. If not this time, they will have other chances.
On a later show, can't remember which one, there was mention of several Christian groups who are forming to support Harris, who is a committed Baptist herself.
I like the fact that Harris and Walz are presenting a different model of the Christian faith.
It's interesting that for many people character no longer matters when it comes to the presidency. I remember the American religious right making a big deal about how important the president's character was during the Great Penis Hunt of 1998. Now it's ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
At any rate, Elon Musk "interviewed" Trump on Xitter yesterday, and it went about as well as you would expect, with a forty minute delay due to technical difficulties followed by two hours of two insufferable men rattling on about how great they each are. Musk is not a trained interviewer so his contribution was to occasionally agree with whatever Trump said. Trump himself sounded, in the words of one analyst, like "what happens when you give Daffy Duck Speed and force him to watch 24 hours of Hitler Speeches". Naturally the New York Times was available to tidy that all up for their account [ paywall ] of the interview.
For their part the Harris/Walz campaign highlighted Trump's praise of Musk's willingness to fire workers who strike for better working conditions.
[x-posted at Elon ******* Musk thread]
Please God.
The fact that so many signatures were gathered indicates that pro-choice referendums continue to popular and motivate voter turnout. We saw this in Ohio in 2023, and pretty much everywhere that's had such a referendum on the ballot since Dobbs.
What makes this especially interesting is that the Trump campaign has not reported this hacking to the FBI (as of August 11). Security blogger Marcie Wheeler speculates as to why that might be so.
This is getting into "why don't the mafia call the police if someone robs them?" territory. We know that Trump mixes the people doing his campaign stuff with the people doing his criminal defense stuff, so a hack that penetrates the campaign email servers could very well score things related to Trump's alleged crimes and his planned legal defenses of same. It's distinctly possible that Trump hasn't reported this to the FBI, which would involve giving the FBI a forensic image of the compromised server(s), because the Justice Department is prosecuting Mr. Trump and this would be like handing over an unknown amount of his defense attorney's privileged material.
I wonder why.
Here's the thing though, as I understand it, if these are third party servers and the FBI has enough for probable cause, they can get a warrant and access to these files.
There are lawyers around who will correct me but I think this is right.
If the FBI carried out the hack, it would be an illegal search. But if evidence from the hack got to them without them soliciting it in any way (I.e. someone published it) then they can use that to get a warrant without running into fruit of the poison tree issues.
Interesting times.
As these days I am a concerned US news junkie (because unfortunately US News often affects the world) I have been fascinated in a rhetorical shift about which I don't think I'm entirely mistaken.
You see either last election or maybe that dreadful day four years ealier, a few months after some Orange Humanoid (of whom I'd never heard*) rode a hideous golden escalator into an obscenely ugly atrium, all the rhetoric seemed to be about something called "middle class" America (or Americans).
This surprised me at the time, a) because I thought in general USAians didn't speak about class much, and b) because in my antipodean world it is the middle classes (moi) who were generally seen as bloated exploiters of the proletariat. It was and is the "working class" who were juggling mortgages, credit cards and loan sharks, who were generally seen to be neglected by bloated milldle class politicuans and bureaucrats. By memory Bernie Sanders used to make pleas for the workers, but few others (and A O-C wasn't on my radar of course until after the 2020 election).
Yet this cycle the phrase "working class" is frequently on lips and pixels. (occasionally lumped with "middle class" but generally not).
Have I dreamed this? Has there been a shift - in language, in awareness (perhaps related to Black Lives Matter?), in political speeach generally?
*I think Lou Reed referred to him once in a satirical song in which he [?]sang[?] "my good friend Donald said to me ..." ("Last Great American Whale")
Speaking from another American perspective...
There's a story I tell a lot about presidential elections. Back in 2000, my first year of college, my favorite professor assigned our Intro to American Government class the assignment of predicting the outcome of the election. It was a big lecture class of ~80 students. We were all assigned states, bigger states were group projects. We each gave a presentation.
And what we learned was that, yes, we could predict the outcome. We knew it would come down to Ohio and Florida, and that it would be a squeaker, which it was.
This can be done because a lot of American states are predictable, and so pundits and politicos tend to focus on a small number of "swing states" that look like they're up for grabs. This time around, a good chunk of them are what used to be solid "blue" territory in the upper midwest, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania in particular. All of these are states that carry what is called a "rust belt" mythology where back in my parents' and grandparents' day, they were very strong democratic states because their elections were dominated by labor unions who all worked at factories.
Between my parents' generation and mine, those unions faltered as the factories failed. And so these states, once referred to as a "blue wall" seem to be crumbling and the GOP has spent a lot of resources trying to turn them around.
Phrases like "blue collar" and "working class" in American hearken back to the culture where, as an acquaintance put it, even a high school dropout could walk into a local factory and get a good-paying union job. It's a culture that a lot of people of a certain complexion and age still dream of. And because of this, both parties like to pander to that dream, either feeding their pride or offering to rebuild it with technology.
It's an old story in the US, one that waxes and wanes with each cycle. I think it also relates to the general kvetching about the cost of things. People want the sense of economic stability that went with the old factory culture and both parties keep saying they're going to bring it back.
And it makes me sad because I don't think anyone can. The world has moved on. We need new dreams. But, as a democrat and an American, we also need to win those states and, in an election, if that's what it takes...you do what you need to do to win.
Re “ in an election, if that's what it takes...you do what you need to do to win,” I would prefer my candidates to tell the truth.
Note, the middle class went from 61% of the population to 50%, Where did the 11% go. A few made it into the upper class, but most dropped down to the working class. Middle class kids are often saddled with student loan debt that really will not go away for a very long time.
Working class young adults who do want to go to college will get grants that do not have to be paid back.
Middle class retirees are having to return to work. Most of them drew down their 401ks especially during the pandemic because they could not adjust their style of living quickly enough. Many could not afford paying into retirement accounts because of heavy credit card debt. Even though the prices of many products have increased over the years, income levels of the middle class stayed relatively flat.
The good thing about Bidens recovery acts are union type wages are increasing. One of the local unions in our area is advertising for new construction workers. They can earn good money while learning skills that are in high demand.
This should continue during the Harris Administration. On the other hand, if Trump gets in, he barks a lot, but he will not likely deliver.
I think this illustrates one of the big historical misconceptions most Americans have about manufacturing labor. For most of their existence factory jobs were not "good jobs" in any sense of the term. In the early 20th century a steel worker would earn around 16¢/hour working an 84 hour week. (In inflation adjusted terms this is less than $3/hour.) That's seven 12 hour shifts per week. And then there was the infamous changeover shift, where the steel mill would switch the day shift workers with the night shift workers by requiring one of those shifts to work a 24 hour shift! What finally made this kind of labor into good jobs is unions forcing the companies to pay good wages for a reasonable amount of work, something @Bullfrog briefly touched on. In other words it's not "the old factory culture" that provided good jobs, it was unionization. There's nothing inherent about factory work that makes it a better job than any other, just a series of historically contingent factors that made that sector highly unionized in the mid-20th century.
In other words a more effective step to restoring a situation where "even a high school dropout could walk into a local [ employer ] and get a good-paying union job" is not restoring heavy industry, it's encouraging unionization wherever possible. The Biden administration has been particularly good about this, and Harris seems on board with continuing this. Like all recent Republican presidents, Trump is very hostile to labor unions.
tl;dr - it wasn't the factories, it was the unions.
I came across an interesting Xitter thread the other day about how the current American political press is singularly ill equipped to perform any of the functions @Gramps49 expects it to. Those who have Xitter accounts can pick up the start of the thread here. For those who are not on Xitter a text transcript can be found here. An excerpt:
I recommend reading the whole thing. While it's long by Xitter thread standards (35 posts), by regular people standards it's not that long.
Kamala Harris has a fairly long public record. More importantly she's the current vice president, so unless she's made some statement distancing herself from the rest of the Biden administration it's fairly safe to assume (and the public is assuming) that her policy preferences are pretty close to those of Joe Biden. We've had three and a half years to see what that looks like. A Harris policy agenda is something along the lines of (in no particular order):
That's just off the top of my head and I may have missed some, but that's a general outline. Now there may be some differences in priority between Biden and Harris, but those differences are trivially small when compared with the yawning chasm between the list above and the policy agenda advocated by Donald Trump, the only other plausible candidate for president this election. Trump's agenda (also a well known quantity from his four years in office) is pretty much the opposite of everything on the list above (except for the increased border security), and if you haven't gotten that by now I don't know how much good a press conference is going to be getting you to wrap your head around those differences.
The main reason the press corps is agitating for a press conference is that Harris is (so far) doing very well without them and they resent that. I'm hoping this represents a change from the usual Democratic relationship with the press, of regarding it as a necessary gatekeeper, to regarding the press as one of many ways of getting your message in front of the public. It's the difference between using your social media account to whine "why won't the press point out what weirdos these guys are?" and using your social media to say "hey, look at these weirdos!"
I think in the UK, the term “middle class” still has its older meaning of someone who owns a business (including small businesses like shops), someone educated in a profession like medicine, law, architecture, etc, or someone who works in management.
In the US, being middle class in non-academic conversational language just means being average, neither rich nor poor, no matter what you own or what kind of job you do, so most people identify as middle class if all you ask them is “Are you middle class?”, even if many of the same people would say they are working class instead of middle class if you gave them more options.
Previous installments of Donald Trump's fan fiction can be found here and here.
It is no wonder that the Republicans are pushing Vance to every event they can think of. It beats allowing their candidate for President of the USA to ever open his mouth in public.
And, in his explanation of why he is "entitled" to make personal attacks on Harris, he unleashed this whopper: "Kamala Harris . . . broke the world, frankly." Which, if it were true, would mean that Harris has done more as Vice President than any Vice President in history! How is she going to top that as President? Break the solar system? The galaxy? The multiverse?
And, my favorite bit from the very stable genius:
Yes. As he was on his favorite hobbyhorse of griping about the 2020 election, he got himself distracted by a box of Cheerios--apparently not having seen one in a long time.
Did Trump have a press conference yesterday? My understanding is that he made a speech to his followers in front of his home and tricked the press into attending by calling it a press conference.
I suppose "tricked" may be assuming too much when it comes to the press corps.
It kind of reminded me of his weird "press conference" from 2016 where he showcased a bunch of Trump-branded products (Trump steaks, Trump wine, Trump water, etc.)