In today’s political news - Part 5

7-17-2022

Very colorful but she does have a point.

Let’s be clear about one thing.  If Manchin’s didn’t have inflation for his latest reason to stop funding to fight climate change it would have been something else He is firmly in the pockets of fossil fuel donors.

So maybe we should actually deal with too many guns in the wrong hands and guns that shouldn’t even be on our streets at all instead of waiting for the “good guy with the gun” to show up.  Oops, they did show up and did nothing for an hour.

I’m all for term limits and I think a mandatory retirement age is a good idea as well.

From the article…

”Clarence Thomas, Jan. 6 and a tipping point for Supreme Court ethics”


“As the Roe decision ricochets through America, further eroding the idea that we live under the rule of law and not raw politics, we must also ask a more fundamental question: Can the U.S. Supreme Court do anything to pull back from the brink of a full-on slide into pure partisanship? Already reeling from the leaked Roe draft opinion earlier this spring, public confidence in the court, with the release of the final decision, has dropped to all-time lows, undermining the legitimacy of a core institutional pillar of American democracy — now itself under siege.

That this siege has been led by lawyers who have sworn to uphold the rule of law — John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and Cleta Mitchell, among others — is a stunning development. Many of these lawyers are currently under investigation by bar associations, which hold the power both to confer professional licenses and to take them away in cases where it finds the fundamental rules of lawyer ethics — which would prohibit the making of false statements, assisting in crime or fraud and not exercising independent judgment — have been violated. Based on facts in the public record, the case for sanctioning the Trump lawyers is strong.

But what about Supreme Court justices? Remarkably, justices are not bound by these same rules of legal ethics. In fact, they are not bound by any ethical rules — a fact that places them at odds not only with practicing lawyers but with virtually all other judges in the United States, including other federal judges, who are governed by the Code of Conduct for United States Judges.

Yet that code exempts Supreme Court justices from its coverage. The rationale is that judges in lower federal courts are established by Congress. In contrast, U.S. Supreme Court justices derive their authority directly from Article III of the Constitution, which provides that they may serve as long as they demonstrate “good behavior” and may only be removed by impeachment.”

What does this have to do with the petty childish tweet that Cruz posted? Anything?

To be clear what the First Lady said was not the point of the post but a US Senator’s boorish behavior.  

And I noticed you made no comment about his tweet, the subject of the post.

Typical.

From Paul Waldman…

“Opinion Joe Biden’s bad news problem”

By Paul Waldman
Columnist
July 12, 2022 at 2:12 p.m. EDT

If you want to understand President Biden’s troubles, just look at all the news about gas prices.

Or to be more specific, look at the lack of media coverage, now that gas prices are falling precipitously, dropping 35 cents just in the last month. Yet the news does not lead every night with stories in which producers scour the country for the least expensive gas so they can put up one picture after another of signs showing how low the price has gotten.


Biden had very little to do with that price decline, just as he had very little to do with the increase that preceded it. Yet the increase was given maximum attention, with lots of discussion of how it would hurt him; the decline is essentially ignored.

It’s just one example that shows how the political and media system in which we all reside is built to make every president look like a failure — right up until they win reelection.

Right now Biden is in an approval trough, one many prior presidents experienced around the same time. The initial honeymoon, driven by all the hope and possibility of a new era, wears off once the difficult work of governing begins.
Legislative successes may come in the first year of a presidency, but then they get harder to come by. The president’s supporters, realizing he’s unable to wave a wand and bring about the paradise he promised during the campaign, begin to feel dissatisfied. Since almost every president sees their party suffer a brutal midterm loss, the news is full of discussion of his coming defeat.

Perhaps most importantly, bad news is always treated as more important than good news, so everything that is bad for the president gets amplified. That applies to gas prices and inflation, and it applies to the president himself: A new poll showing him with surprisingly high approval ratings will get a fraction of the coverage of one showing him with surprisingly low approval.

So you probably saw extensive media coverage of a New York Times poll that came out Monday, showing a majority of Democrats saying they want another presidential nominee in 2024. While no one would say it doesn’t show weakness for Biden, it’s an old story; here’s an article in The Post from September of 1982 about a poll showing a majority of voters saying Ronald Reagan shouldn’t run again in 1984. You may remember how that election turned out.

It’s a good reminder of how presidential approval tends to ebb and flow.

Obviously, real-world events make a big difference, whether it’s the economy or foreign crises or natural disasters. But what we often see is that after the first midterm defeat, presidents slowly recover the public’s esteem, and everything changes once the public is presented with a binary choice between the president and a challenger.

That isn’t to deny Biden could have done plenty of things better. Like other liberals, I’ve been critical of some of his choices and his handling of a number of issues. I worry that he has been unable to manage his party’s base to keep them engaged and energized. And there are legitimate questions about his age (he’d be 86 at the end of his second term).

But we should also be careful when we discern a causal connection between whatever substantive or stylistic critique we have of the president and his low approval ratings.

Here’s an example: One criticism Biden’s supporters make is that he can be too downbeat, that to demonstrate sympathy with people’s struggles only reinforces the idea that things are bad. It’s a reasonable point, but it’s also sometimes accompanied by the observation that if Donald Trump were in the same situation, he’d say that even the most incremental improvement anywhere is the greatest thing that ever happened in world history and we should all be down on our knees thanking him.

Whenever there’s a good jobs report or even a decline in gas prices, some liberals will say, “If this was Trump he’d be on the news taking credit for it!” Which indeed he would. But people often forget that it didn’t actually work.
Trump never convinced most Americans he was doing a great job; he was the only president in the history of polling never to crack 50 percent approval, not even for a single day. His party was blown out in the 2018 midterms, and then he lost his reelection bid.

You may believe that in a just and rational world, Trump’s approval would have never been higher than 5 or 10 percent, but even so, all his preening and bragging clearly failed. And while it might not hurt for Biden to have a more relentlessly positive message, there isn’t much reason to think doing so would have an enormous effect on how voters think of him.

None of this means Biden is a secret political genius. But other presidents — Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama — found themselves in similar situations and recovered to win reelection and leave office in the glow of public affection. The same could happen to Biden, and the good news for him is that if there’s a story the media loves almost as much as the one that says everything is terrible, it’s the one about a dramatic comeback.”

Gavin Newsom says he is not running for President in 2024 and I believe him for a lot of reasons.

Having said that, you are not hearing what he is saying “Democrats need the Democratic PARTY, not the president, to organize with more ferocity of focus, more determination to set the agenda, and put the other party on the defense.”

And he’s right. 



But let’s see, Gavin Newsom can’t win because he is a coastal elitist and Secretary Pete can’t win because he’s gay.  Neither of these have anything to do with their ABILITY TO DO THE JOB!  It’s thinking like this that proves my point.

Unbelievable.